Research Platforms Engineer

So much of the world impacting research of the University of Sheffield increasingly relies on computation. From the machine learning and AI models developed by the world class Natural Language Processing group to the medical image analysis and modelling pipelines developed by the people in the Insigneo group and not forgetting the fundamental science done in our physics and chemistry schools.

This is an amazing opportunity to turn your passion for advanced technology into an exciting career in research computing while enabling research that has a real world impact. If you are seriously into technology and how to use it to change the world, then this might be the role for you.

We are looking for someone to join our Research Platforms Engineering team. These are a small and dedicated bunch of people who maintain our HPC cluster and cloud (AWS) based secure data platform. They make sure that the cutting edge tech that researchers need to do AI, fluid dynamics, health data analysis and molecular modelling simulations are available, reliable and blisteringly fast.

This needs some deep understanding of computing equipment like storage (e.g. Lustre), networking (e.g. Infiniband), GPUs (e.g. NVidia H100s), operating systems (e.g. Linux) and systems software (e.g. Slurm, Docker, K8s). Don’t worry, this is an entry level role where we don’t expect you to know everything (to start with). But we will expect you to be a keen learner. Perhaps you’ve already been learning similar technologies using a homelab setup or on the cloud.

In this role you will be hands-on in maintaining and improving the platforms, making sure that they are performing as expected and investigating and resolving issues and errors. You will ensure that the platforms are always secure applying patches and updates for the operating systems and systems software. You will be looking out for ways to make routine tasks easier and safer by automating them with Infrastructure-as-code tools such as Puppet or CloudFormation.

As part of a team of experienced engineers you will get the chance to learn skills and practices to be able to progress, take on more responsibilities and could lead you into a career in Digital Research Infrastructure and get involved in building the next national supercomputer or AI cluster.

Working within the IT Services team, supporting the Research and Innovation Product teams, you will be part of an inclusive, motivated and supportive team of technical and domain experts who are all passionate about enabling world changing research at the University of Sheffield.

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