Advanced Research Computing (ARC) is an award-winning team, based in IT Services at the University of Birmingham (UK). ARC has earned a national and international profile for delivering high-quality services for researchers. ARC provides both national and local services that underpin computational research. National services include Baskerville, a £4.5M Tier 2 GPU facility supporting High Performance Computing and AI, and CLIMB, a private cloud for Microbial Bioinformatics, that helped processes most the UK’s COVID-19 genome sequencing data.
The ARC team currently numbers 30 staff with three subdivisions, which provide a full range of research computing services, including Software Development and Application support, Training, outreach and advice, and the provision of underpinning infrastructure, including High Performance Computing, Storage, backup and archive services.
Principal Research Infrastructure Engineers are the University’s leading subject matter experts in their given field and have a substantial degree of independent professional responsibility and discretion. We are looking for candidates with substantial experience in High Performance Computing and/or Research Storage infrastructure.
All candidates must have a very strong background in Linux systems administration, with a strong and demonstrable record of delivering production services. Candidates should have several years of experience with some of the following technologies: Linux, Git, Python, Configuration management (Ansible, Salt, Puppet, or similar), datacentres and datacentre class hardware (storage, servers, networking), Job Schedulers (Slurm, Torque/Moab, LSF), parallel filesystems (Lustre, Weka, Spectrum Scale), Private Cloud (Openstack, Ceph) and a sound understanding of systems security (including operational, architectural and policy-based elements).
Candidates do not need to have experience with every one of these technologies but should be able to demonstrate real world experience with multiple specific technologies from this list. In addition, candidates must have experience of managing services through their entire lifecycle (including conception, architecture, procurement, commissioning, production, and decommissioning).
Candidates should be clear confident communicators, who are equally comfortable communicating with researchers, technical staff, senior stakeholders and external suppliers.