Location
Hammersmith, London

Hours
Full Time, Permanent

Salary
£57,623 - £61,622 plus London Allowance £5,560 per annum
Higher salary of £61,622 - £67,693 plus London Allowance £5,560 per annum available for candidates with significant relevant experience

About the Role
As a Senior Research HPC Engineer, you will collaborate regularly with Heads of IT, Bioinformatics, and other stakeholders to develop and deliver scientific computing infrastructure, software provisions, and resilient services aligned with strategic and scientific goals. You will work closely with researchers to develop reusable tools and translate experimental and analytical requirements into scalable computational solutions that accelerate scientific discovery and improve research productivity.

Your responsibilities will include supporting researchers in utilising HPC, triaging user issues, and translating common pain points into platform improvements. You will help build and maintain reproducible runtime environments, container images, and workflow-supporting services for scientific computing workloads such as bioinformatics, AI/ML, data processing, and simulation workflows.

You will coordinate HPC user training and onboarding, ensure best practices in project management, monitor and promote the Institute’s Scientific Computing provisions, and design communication strategies for effective stakeholder engagement. Developing and delivering training, documentation, and onboarding materials to empower researchers will be key to your role.

You will also maximise networking opportunities with similar organisations to benchmark services and research emerging trends to ensure future provision and cost-effective delivery of the Institute’s scientific goals.

Technical activities include scoping, provisioning, configuring, scaling, and validating compute, storage, networking, and platform services within HPC infrastructure. You will support packaging, versioning, and validation of scientific software to ensure reproducibility and portability, establish policies for workload management, install and manage Linux applications, resolve workflow performance issues, and implement management and monitoring tools.

Alongside the Head of IT, you will document and implement disaster recovery processes, maintain HPC resources through proactive maintenance and troubleshooting, apply security patches, support HPC usage policies, and assist LMS IT staff with Linux/Unix system issues. Other duties commensurate with the grade of the post will be directed by your supervisor.

Experience
- Hands-on experience supporting and administering Linux-based systems in HPC, research, academic, or production environments
- Experience configuring and maintaining multi-queue job scheduling systems (e.g. SLURM)
- Experience with scientific software compilation and deployment systems (e.g. Spack, EasyBuild, Lmod, conda)
- Virtualisation and containerisation deployment and management (e.g. Docker, Singularity)
- Ability to work closely with multidisciplinary research teams and deliver practical scientific computing services
- Knowledge of scripting (e.g., Bash) and version control systems (e.g., Git/GitHub)
- Integration of heterogeneous Linux/Windows/Mac environments (e.g. Active Directory)
- Troubleshooting skills across systems, networking, storage, identity, containers, schedulers, and user workloads
- Experience with automation tooling (e.g. Salt, xCAT)
- Awareness of HPC cybersecurity principles, best practices, and emerging threats

About you
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Self-motivated and able to work independently and collaboratively
- Effective planning, multitasking, and prioritisation skills with adaptability in challenging situations
- Ability to engage colleagues and stakeholders appropriately
- Collaborative and able to develop cross-boundary working relationships
- Positive contributor to IT and cross-functional teams, sharing knowledge and skills

Qualifications
Essential
- Degree in computing, scientific research, engineering, or equivalent skills and experience with a significant computational component
- Significant relevant experience at a high level

Desirable
- Industry-standard Linux certifications (e.g. RHCA, RHCSA)
- Project management qualifications (e.g. PRINCE2)
- Knowledge or qualifications in cloud computing
- Higher-level scientific education
- Exposure to computational research involving GPU, AI/ML methods applied to biomedical problems
- Experience supporting GPU-accelerated workloads, NVIDIA tooling, CUDA-aware environments
- Familiarity with bioinformatics or scientific workflow frameworks (e.g., Nextflow, Snakemake, WDL/Cromwell)
- Experience in scientific, academic, life-science, or research computing environments
- Knowledge of tools supporting reproducible research and automation (e.g., CI/CD pipelines, IaC tools like Ansible, Terraform)
- Familiarity with large-scale biological data types and associated storage/access challenges
- Familiarity with identity, access, and security controls in Linux or research environments
- Programming experience in C, R, or Python
- Experience monitoring and optimising research workloads and system performance (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus)

People Leadership (Desirable)
- Motivating and developing staff through HPC onboarding and training
- Project managing work packages within and between groups
- Resolving complaints and conflict resolution