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University of Colorado Boulder · 2 hours ago

Senior Technical Lead of Research Infrastructure

Boulder, CO

Full-time

Hybrid

Senior Level, Lead/Staff

$100K/yr - $112K/yr

5+ years exp

The University of Colorado Boulder is seeking a Senior Technical Lead of Research Infrastructure to provide technical leadership and hands-on expertise for research computing infrastructure. This role involves mentoring team members, translating architectural direction into practical implementations, and managing HPC and storage systems while ensuring system reliability and operational improvements.

Universities

No H1B

Responsibilities

The Senior Technical Lead translates architectural direction into hands-on infrastructure solutions, serving as the team's primary technical escalation point when complex HPC and storage challenges arise

This role shapes day-to-day technical decision-making for infrastructure operations and improvements, while establishing and maintaining the technical standards, procedures, and standard practices that guide the team's systems work

The position tackles sophisticated multi-system issues that span infrastructure domains and champions automation, monitoring, and operational improvements that strengthen system reliability

This position performs hands-on administration of HPC clusters, storage systems (ZFS, RAID, GPFS, Lustre), and parallel computing infrastructure, leading complex system changes, upgrades, and optimizations

This role conducts hardware repairs, OS configuration (Linux/Unix), and software updates while optimizing system performance, resource utilization, and data-transfer capabilities (Globus)

The position manages compute resources and job schedulers (SLURM), automates infrastructure provisioning through configuration management tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef), and develops monitoring and observability platforms (Nagios, Grafana) to maintain system reliability

The Senior Technical Lead mentors HPC and Storage System Administrators on technical skills and problem-solving approaches, providing hands-on guidance during complex implementations and troubleshooting

This role develops team capabilities through pairing, code reviews, and guided learning while building team confidence to handle infrastructure challenges independently

The position coaches team members on user documentation and knowledge-sharing, supports cross-training initiatives to reduce single points of failure, and champions a collaborative problem-solving culture within the RIT team

The Senior Technical Lead maintains technical runbooks, procedures, and troubleshooting guides while documenting system configurations and implementation details

This role creates and updates architectural diagrams for team reference, work with the team to build knowledge base and wiki, and conducts technical knowledge-sharing sessions for the RIT team

The Senior Technical Lead coordinates with User Support (UST), Data Center Operations (DCOPS) and other teams on technical issues, participates in sprint planning and Agile processes, and provides technical input on infrastructure planning and vendor evaluations

This role supports the Associate Director with technical assessments and recommendations, and advises researchers on optimal infrastructure use when brought up

The position is expected to use open source and community projects to enhance infrastructure capabilities

This position will maintain professional expertise in the field by reviewing trade publications lists, studying the latest vendor trends, reviewing pertinent mailing lists and attending seminars, training sessions and conferences

This position will identify and elect relevant training opportunities that would be most beneficial to the organization

Qualification

HPC systemsResearch storageLinux systemsBatch queueing systemsNetwork interconnectsTechnical leadershipMentorshipDocumentationCollaboration

Required

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Engineering or related field. A combination of education and relevant experience as described below may be substituted for a degree on a year-for-year basis

5+ years experience in IT infrastructure administration with deep technical depth in HPC or storage systems

5+ years experience working with HPC clusters or large-scale research storage environments

3+ years in a senior technical role with mentorship or technical leadership responsibilities

Exceptional ability to work effectively both within a team and independently, as circumstances warrant

Ability to follow through with assignments and commitments in a timely and professional manner

Ability to work from a set of requirements to build complex computing systems

Ability to develop and advocate independent solutions and system designs

Experience in system and related network administration of complex computer systems, specifically Linux systems and preferably Linux clusters

Experience diagnosing and repairing computer hardware

Experience with batch queueing systems, preferably Slurm

Experience with network interconnects (e.g., Intel Omni-Path Architecture, Mellanox InfiniBand, RoCE)

Preferred

Master's Degree or equivalent experience

Background in higher education or research environments

Linux Professional Institute (LPIC) or Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)

Demonstrated experience in system and related network administration of complex computer systems, specifically Linux systems and preferably Linux clusters

Demonstrated experience with an on-premises clustered virtualization environment. For example: OpenStack (preferred), OpenNebula, Ovirt, Proxmox

Experience with Linux network file systems, particularly NFSv3