HPC Engineer, Scientific Computing Platform

Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford; Oxford; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 85,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Enhanced holiday pay

Pension

Life Assurance

Income Protection

Private Medical Insurance

Hospital Cash Plan

Therapy Services

Perk Box

Electric Car Scheme

Job summary

The Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford invites applications for a Scientific Computing HPC Engineer within the Generative Biology Institute (GBI). You will operate and scale the data and computing platform enabling cutting-edge research in engineering biology.

This role emphasizes practical systems work, learning new technologies, and building reliable, scalable services that advance GBI's scientific mission while supporting researchers day-to-day in a hybrid Oxford-based setup.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, or related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Hands-on experience supporting or administering Linux-based systems in HPC/cloud/research environments.
• Working knowledge of HPC/batch computing concepts including schedulers, queues/partitions, shared filesystems; Slurm preferred.
• Ability to troubleshoot across systems, networking, storage, identity, containers, schedulers, and user workloads.
• Experience with scripting, automation, and version-controlled changes using Git, CI/CD, Terraform, Ansible, Helm, or similar.
• Ability to work with multidisciplinary teams and deliver practical services for scientific goals.
• Strong communication and documentation skills; ability to explain technical concepts clearly.

Responsibilities

• Operate, maintain, and improve GBI's hybrid HPC platform, including Linux compute environments, Slurm/Slinky workloads, Kubernetes/OKE services, Open OnDemand, GPU and CPU partitions, and shared storage.
• Provision, configure, scale, and validate compute, storage, networking, and platform services using IaC and automation tools (Terraform, Helm, Ansible).
• Monitor platform health, capacity, job scheduling, GPU utilisation, storage behaviour, and network performance; investigate issues with Prometheus and Grafana.
• Support researchers in using the Scientific Computing Platform, triaging issues and translating pain points into improvements.
• Build and maintain reproducible runtime environments, container images, and workflow-supporting services for bioinformatics, AI/ML, data processing, and simulations.
• Contribute to safe rollout and maintenance of Slurm images, worker nodes, scheduler config, container runtimes, updates, and monitoring improvements.
• Create and maintain technical docs, runbooks, checks, and issue/PR notes for consistent operations.

Skills

Linux

HPC

Slurm

Kubernetes

Terraform

Ansible

Scripting

Git

Documentation

Communication

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science/Engineering/Physics/Math

Tools

Open OnDemand

Prometheus

Grafana

OCI OKE

Nextflow

Docker

Podman

Job description

The Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford invites applications for a Scientific Computing HPC Engineer within the Generative Biology Institute (GBI). You will operate and scale the data and computing platform enabling cutting-edge research in engineering biology.

This role emphasizes practical systems work, learning new technologies, and building reliable, scalable services that advance GBI's scientific mission while supporting researchers day-to-day in a hybrid Oxford-based setup.