Orchestration Workload Engineer - ACE - AI Factory

Roche; Kaiseraugst; Vor Ort; CHF 150.000 - 190.000; Vollzeit

Zusammenfassung

Roche Kaiseraugst seeks a Workload Orchestration Engineer to own and advance SLURM-based scheduling across HPC and AI environments. You will drive resource optimization for multi-node CPU/GPU, ensuring high availability and efficient execution of research workloads.

You will lead cross‑functional initiatives, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Observability to deploy telemetry dashboards that monitor queue times and hardware utilization.

Qualifikationen

• Bachelor's or advanced degree in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or Computational Engineering.
• Extensive experience in workload scheduling and SLURM administration.
• Proven track record leading complex technical initiatives.
• Experience in life sciences, pharmaceutical R&D, or high‑performance computing environments.

Aufgaben

• Lead SLURM architecture, tuning, and policy design.
• Bridge HPC and cloud-native ecosystems with Kubernetes integrations.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across cross-functional teams.
• Partner with Observability to implement telemetry dashboards for efficiency.

Kenntnisse

SLURM administration

Workload scheduling

Multi-tenant cluster optimization

Technical leadership & mentoring

Life sciences / pharmaceutical R&D

Ausbildung

Bachelor's or higher in Computer Science / Applied Mathematics / Computational Engineering

Tools

SLURM

Kubernetes

Singularity/Apptainer

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.

Hosting and Infrastructure (HI) provides mission-critical on-premises infrastructure, cloud hosting, connectivity, and technology products that enable all functions at every Roche site to develop, innovate, connect, and deliver compliant digital products across the Roche Enterprise.

The Value Streams - Accelerated Compute Engineering (ACE) Team acts as a center of excellence and delivery for High Performance Compute and AI Infrastructure across Roche. This team facilitates seamless onboarding and adoption for business vertical customers needing accelerated compute-helping infrastructure consumers optimize for high availability, seamless data transfer, flexibility, speed, and the rapidly changing needs of AI to achieve rapid time-to-value.

The Opportunity

• SLURM Architecture & Ecosystem Leadership

  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 in SlurmDBD and accounting architecture, database performance and lifecycle management, scheduler telemetry and health monitoring, workload efficiency analysis, queue/wait-time diagnostics, util