Orchestration Workload Engineer - ACE - AI Factory

F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG; Kaiseraugst; Vor Ort; CHF 120.000 - 180.000; Vollzeit

Zusammenfassung

Roche is seeking a Workload Orchestration Engineer within the ACE team to lead SLURM-based workload management across heterogeneous HPC and AI environments. You will architect, scale, and maintain SLURM, driving multi-tenant resource distribution and advanced configurations while bridging traditional HPC with modern AI workloads.

You will mentor colleagues, design policy-driven orchestration standards, and partner with Observability to implement telemetry for job efficiency, queue wait times,

Qualifikationen

• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Computational Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Extensive systems engineering experience with deep specialization in workload scheduling, SLURM administration, and multi-tenant cluster optimization.
• Demonstrated track record of leading complex technical initiatives and mentoring engineering peers.
• Proven experience in life sciences, pharmaceutical R&D, or high-performance scientific research environments.

Aufgaben

• Own and advance scheduler tech stack across HPC platforms and AI environments to optimize compute workloads.
• Bridge traditional scientific computing with modern AI paradigms and mentor colleagues.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives to establish workload orchestration standards and governance across Roche compute environments.
• Collaborate with Observability Engineers to build telemetry dashboards for SLURM efficiency and utilization.
• Integrate SLURM with Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystems to streamline job submission workflows.

Kenntnisse

SLURM workload orchestration

HPC scheduling

Kubernetes integration

Container runtimes

Infrastructure as Code

Multi-tenant optimization

Ausbildung

Bachelor's or advanced degree in Computer Science / related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Singularity/Apptainer

Docker

Ansible

Terraform

SlurmDBD

Jobbeschreibung

At Roche you can show up as yourself, embraced for the unique qualities you bring. Our culture encourages personal expression, open dialogue, and genuine connections, where you are valued, accepted and respected for who you are, allowing you to thrive both personally and professionally. This is how we aim to prevent, stop and cure diseases and ensure everyone has access to healthcare today and for generations to come. Join Roche, where every voice matters.

The Position

As a Workload Orchestration Engineer within the Accelerated Compute Engineering (ACE) team, you will be recognised internally as an expert in workload orchestration, owning and advancing our scheduler tech stack across our High-Performance Computing (HPC) platforms. With the rapid expansion of our compute infrastructure, your broad expertise will drive the efficient scheduling, policy management, and resource optimization of our multi-node CPU and GPU environments. In this role, you will use your expertise to bridge traditional scientific computing with modern AI paradigms, while acting as a coach and mentor to help colleagues develop technical expertise. You will solve unique, unprecedented scheduling and infrastructure challenges that directly impact Roche’s compute architecture, ensuring our researchers, data scientists, and engineers can execute compute workloads reliably, efficiently, and successfully.

The Opportunity

Serve as the internal expert on the SLURM Workload Manager, architecting, scaling, and maintaining SLURM across heterogeneous HPC (and AI environments) to ensure high availability and dynamic resource distribution. Design and tune advanced SLURM configurations, including custom plugin integration, topology-aware scheduling, GRES/GPU management, dynamic priority trees, and complex QoS/fair-share policies. Bridge HPC and cloud-native ecosystems by evaluating and implementing integrations between SLURM, Kubernetes, and orchestration platforms (e.g., SLURM Slinky or Run:ai) to streamline job submission workflows across architectures.

Hybrid Workload & Kubernetes Integration

Integrate containerization standards across SLURM (using Singularity/Apptainer) while maintaining operational familiarity with Kubernetes container orchestration to support hybrid AI/HPC workloads. Solve unique, unprecedented multi-tenant bottlenecks, such as GPU allocation overhead, MPI/NCCL communication failures, and complex workload failures.

Technical Leadership, Mentorship & Governance

Lead large, global cross-functional initiatives across ACE, infrastructure, platform, scientific computing, and AI teams to establish workload orchestration standards, policies, and architectural patterns across Roche compute environments. Act as a technical mentor and coach for junior and mid-level engineers, driving skill development and continuous learning across the chapter. Partner with Observability Engineers to establish deep telemetry dashboards for SLURM job efficiency, queue wait times, and hardware utilization, utilizing configuration-as-code to deploy policies uniformly.

Who You Are

• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Computational Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Extensive systems engineering experience with deep specialization in workload scheduling, SLURM administration, and multi-tenant cluster optimization.
• Demonstrated track record of leading complex technical initiatives and mentoring engineering peers.
• Proven experience in life sciences, pharmaceutical R&D, or high-performance scientific research environments.

SLURM Architecture & Optimization

• Subject matter expertise in architecting, scaling, upgrading, and optimizing production SLURM environments, including scheduler/backfill tuning, partition and topology design, priority/fair-share/QoS policies, cgroups, HA architecture, plugin integration, and GRES/TRES modeling for GPUs and specialized resources.

SLURM Operations, Accounting & Observability

• Deep expertise with SlurmDBD and accounting architecture, database performance and lifecycle management, scheduler telemetry and health monitoring, workload efficiency analysis, queue/wait-time diagnostics, utilization analysis, and troubleshooting complex controller, database, node, and workload interactions.

Kubernetes & Container Knowledge

• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes fundamentals and container runtimes (Singularity, Apptainer, Enroot, Docker) within an HPC context.

AI Infrastructure & Interconnects

• Deep familiarity with GPU scheduling (NVIDIA MIG, fractionalization), high-speed interconnects (InfiniBand, RoCE), and multi-node communication frameworks (MPI, NCCL).

Automation

• Advanced proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code (Ansible, Terraform) to automate scheduler deployments, configuration drift management, and telemetry pipelines.

Broad Platform Expertise

• Apply broad knowledge across HPC, AI infrastructure, Kubernetes, containers, networking/interconnects, observability, automation, and capacity management to solve orchestration problems spanning multiple technology domains.

Domain Expertise & ProblemSolving

• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex, unprecedented failure modes at the intersection of hardware, OS, schedulers, and workloads.

Coaching & Collaboration

• Strong leadership presence with a dedication to mentoring colleagues, driving technical standards, and collaborating with global cross-functional teams.

Cross-Organizational Coordination

• Collaborative team player with demonstrated ability to coordinate initiatives across diverse global business units, IT functions, and scientific research stakeholders.

StrategicVision

• Passion for guiding the convergence of traditional HPC schedulers like SLURM with cloud-native, Kubernetes-driven AI workflows.

#RDT2026

Where pay transparency applies, details are provided based on the primary posting location. For this role, the primary location is Kaiseraugst. If you are interested in additional locations where the role may be available, we will provide the relevant compensation details later in the hiring process.

Whoweare

A healthier future drives us to innovate. Together, over 100’000 employees across the globe are dedicated to advance science, ensuring everyone has access to healthcare today and for generations to come. Our efforts result in more than 26 million people treated with our medicines and over 30 billion tests conducted using our Diagnostics products. We empower each other to explore new possibilities, foster creativity, and keep our ambitions high, so we can deliver life-changing healthcare solutions that make a global impact. Let’s build a healthier future, together. Roche is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We believe it’s urgent to deliver medical solutions right now – even as we develop innovations for the future. We are courageous in both decision and action. And we believe that good business means a better world. That is why we come to work each day. We commit ourselves to scientific rigor, unassailable ethics, and access to medical innovations for all. We do this today to build a better tomorrow. We are proud of who we are, what we do, and how we do it. We are many, working as one across functions, across companies, and across the world. We are Roche.