Senior HPC Systems Engineer – Linux, Slurm & GPUs

Starion; Frascati; Remote; EUR 50,000 - 65,000; Full time

Job summary

Starion is seeking an HPC System Engineering Expert to join at the European Space Agency’s ESRIN site in Frascati, Italy. You will manage Linux-based HPC clusters, schedule workloads, and optimize performance across compute and storage resources.

The role entails maintaining configurations, driving evolution of the HPC environment, and contributing to infrastructure projects like Power BI dashboards and cloud integrations. Fluency in English and strong problem-solving are essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field.
• At least 5 years of relevant professional experience, including 3 years of hands-on HPC engineering/administration experience.
• Strong technical background in Linux/Unix-based HPC environments, including job scheduling, resource accounting, storage and data management.
• Experience with parallel computing frameworks such as MPI and OpenMP, and containerisation technologies such as Docker and Singularity.
• Strong proficiency in troubleshooting, scripting, automation and secure operational administration.
• Experience in performance tuning and optimisation of HPC applications.

Responsibilities

• Administer and maintain Linux/Unix-based HPC clusters, including compute, login/service nodes, GPU/accelerator resources and cluster services.
• Install, configure, upgrade and maintain operating systems, drivers, firmware and HPC system components.
• Maintain controlled system configurations, technical procedures and configuration consistency across the HPC environment.
• Configure and administer HPC workload-management and scheduling systems such as Slurm, PBS or equivalent technologies.
• Manage queues, partitions, reservations, resource allocation and accounting, including fair-use policies.
• Analyse workloads and resource consumption to identify bottlenecks and improve utilisation.
• Monitor the health and performance of compute, accelerator, storage and cluster services.
• Analyse alerts, logs and system behaviour, performing root-cause analysis of complex hardware, operating-system, network, storage and software issues.
• Implement authorised corrective actions and workarounds, coordinating with vendors and technical teams where required and verifying service restoration.
• Support the definition and development of the Agency’s vision and strategic roadmap for the future Space HPC environment, especially interfaces and administration through the ESA Internal Cloud.
• Support the development and maintenance of Power BI dashboards and Power Apps, including data pre-processing and transformation, SQL scripting and configuration of ETL tools on-premises and in Microsoft Azure.
• Plan and implement patches, upgrades and configuration changes, including impact analysis, testing and rollback preparation.
• Track hardware and software lifecycles, identify technical risks and contribute to infrastructure refresh and HPC platform evolution.
• Monitor and analyse CPU, GPU, memory, storage and workload utilisation, identifying bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement.
• Support benchmarking, profiling and performance-tuning activities.
• Analyse utilisation, congestion and storage-growth trends to support capacity planning and future infrastructure requirements.
• Provide evidence-based recommendations for infrastructure optimisation and evolution.

Skills

Fluent English

Troubleshooting

Scripting & automation

Analytical thinking

Organisational skills

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Docker

Singularity

MPI

OpenMP

Job description

Starion is seeking an HPC System Engineering Expert to join at the European Space Agency’s ESRIN site in Frascati, Italy. You will manage Linux-based HPC clusters, schedule workloads, and optimize performance across compute and storage resources.

The role entails maintaining configurations, driving evolution of the HPC environment, and contributing to infrastructure projects like Power BI dashboards and cloud integrations. Fluency in English and strong problem-solving are essential.