HPC Engineer — Secure, Scalable Research Clusters

Harvard University; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Parental leave

Medical insurance

Retirement plans

Wellbeing resources

Family support

Tuition assistance

Commuter benefits

Job summary

Harvard University’s HPC Engineering team is seeking an experienced HPC Engineer to support secure, scalable compute environments for research computing. You will provision clusters, tune schedulers, manage identities, and maintain user-facing environments.

Join a collaborative team that values operational reliability, scripting, and automation. This role involves on-call duties, cross-team coordination, and contributing to documentation and best practices across HMS research computing.

Qualifications

• Minimum of two years’ post-secondary education or relevant work experience.
• Bachelor's degree preferred.
• Experience managing Linux-based systems in a research or academic environment.
• Familiarity with workload schedulers (Slurm preferred), cluster provisioning, or performance tuning.
• Experience with infrastructure monitoring, configuration management (e.g., Ansible), and containerization (e.g., Apptainer/Singularity, Docker).
• Understanding of security and compliance frameworks relevant to research computing.
• Strong troubleshooting, communication, and collaboration skills.
• Ability to work in a team-oriented environment and adapt to evolving priorities.
• Demonstrated service orientation and commitment to operational reliability.

Responsibilities

• Provisioning, configuration, and decommissioning of HPC compute clusters.
• Administration and tuning of workload schedulers to ensure efficient job management.
• Maintain secure, regulated compute environments.
• Integrate user accounts and identity management with institutional systems.
• Maintain and optimize user-facing software environments and containerized apps.
• Develop and maintain scripts, automation, and tools for cluster operations.
• Monitor system health, respond to alerts, and assist with documentation.
• Collaborate with researchers to troubleshoot and improve the computing environment.
• Contribute to operational documentation and knowledge sharing.
• Participate in off-hours on-call rotation.
• Perform additional duties as assigned.

Skills

Linux administration

Troubleshooting

Documentation

Security awareness

Scripting

Education

Two years post-secondary education

Bachelor's degree preferred

Tools

Slurm

Ansible

Apptainer/Singularity

Docker

Monitoring tools

Job description

Harvard University’s HPC Engineering team is seeking an experienced HPC Engineer to support secure, scalable compute environments for research computing. You will provision clusters, tune schedulers, manage identities, and maintain user-facing environments.

Join a collaborative team that values operational reliability, scripting, and automation. This role involves on-call duties, cross-team coordination, and contributing to documentation and best practices across HMS research computing.