Graduate Research Infrastructure Engineer - IT Services - 106988 - Grade 6 (2 Positions)

Graduate Systems Engineer

Advanced Research Computing (ARC) is an award-winning team based in IT Services which has earned a national and international profile for delivering high quality, underpinning research computing services.

The Architecture, Infrastructure and Systems (AIS) group works in partnership with ARC's Research Software Group and Research Engagement and Data Group to provide a sector leading environment for computationally and data intensive research, catering for all academic disciplines. The Group's responsibilities include the design and management of local and national High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities, private cloud, multi-petabyte storage infrastructure as well as high-bandwidth (400Gb/s) low-latency networks. AIS also has a shared responsibility for the management of a purpose-built water-cooled data centre, designed to house HPC and AI infrastructure.

The nature of the users of BEAR services mean that ARC is a dynamic part of the organisation, working with some of the latest technology to give our researchers an advantage over their peers. Under the guidance of the AIS Group Leader, the Graduate Systems Engineer will build the skills to contribute to the delivery and support of these systems, working across a range of technologies.

The University of Birmingham has a record of sustained investment in HPC and research storage infrastructures and has just secured funding for the next 5 years. In recent years, ARC has expanded considerably. The Team has built a strong reputation on campus and in the Higher Education Sector for quality and innovation.

ARC's specialist systems and services are collectively known as BEAR (the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research). For further information see www.birmingham.ac.uk/BEAR

The Graduate Systems Engineer is a member of ARC's AIS group and will be developed to be responsible for:

• Maintenance and support of BEAR infrastructure
• Contributing to the security and efficient operation of all elements of the infrastructure:
• Supporting users and responding to user issues and requests
• Supporting outreach activity to enable exploitation of BEAR by a broader, and potentially non-traditional, user-base

Main duties include:

• Undertake administrative tasks, for example system updates, hardware faults and configuration management under the direction of the team lead.
• Undertake operational support of research computing services, for example HPC, Gitlab, Storage, Backup, Archive and Network.
• Undertake operational support of the underpinning systems that support the BEAR infrastructure, for example databases, network and configuration management.
• Under the guidance of other team members, support the upgrade and development of services and service components.
• Under the guidance of the team lead, develop proof-of-concepts and support the development of new services.
• Build relationships with the research community and participate in outreach activity. Working with external suppliers, ensure that hardware faults are resolved promptly. Support the implementation of technical strategies and solutions to maximize the efficiency of operations.
• Creating and maintaining appropriate documentation to support services.
• Participate in the triaging rota for support tickets to facilitate appropriate and efficient responses to meet service levels.
• Undertake other such duties as may be required from time to time in furtherance of the work of IT Services.

Required knowledge, skills, qualifications, and experience include:

• Formal education to degree level in a STEM subject with some programming experience, or equivalent experience.
• Experience working with Linux, ideally with experience of Linux system administration.
• Proficiency in scripting skills is essential (such as BASH, Python, Perl).
• Experience of using source code version control such as git is essential.
• Ability to build and maintain relationships in a professional or similar environment.
• Ability to work as part of a team to achieve goals or deliver services.
• Ability to solve complex problems.
• A self-motivated learner in the computing domain
• Good communication skills, both written and oral.
• Good broad knowledge of C&IT, including latest technology industry trends.

Desirable experience:

• Experience with configuration management tool is highly desirable (such as Salt, Puppet or Ansible).
• An awareness of storage technologies such as SAN, NAS, direct attached, SAS is desirable.
• An understanding of networking design and operation (TCP/IP, Infiniband).
• Some experience of cloud and container technologies (e.g., OpenStack, Docker, Singularity)
• Some experience of HPC job scheduling tools (such as SLURM) would be an advantage.