Junior HPC Engineer: Build, Monitor, and Scale Clusters

Parallel Works; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Vision coverage

Dental coverage

401(k) with company match

Paid vacation

Sick time

Job summary

Parallel Works seeks a Junior HPC Systems Engineer to learn supercomputing operations on production systems. The role starts with monitoring, node health, and account work, then moves into cluster builds and escalations across hybrid on-prem and cloud environments.

Strong Linux fundamentals are required; experience with Slurm and HPC concepts is helpful. The position offers growth into senior roles with hands-on responsibility.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of hands-on Linux administration across RHEL, Rocky, Alma, Debian and Ubuntu.
• HPC fundamentals: batch scheduling, shared filesystems, MPI launch.
• Bash and Python scripting for operational tasks.
• Practical networking: DNS, routing, firewalls, SSH keys, bastion access.
• Git and a ticket-driven workflow with clear written communication.
• Interest in on-premises estate: bare metal, out-of-band consoles, site networking.
• US citizenship and eligibility for a Secret clearance; active clearance helpful but not required; we sponsor eligible candidates.

Responsibilities

• Monitor cluster health, node state, queue behavior and alerting; act on node failures and filesystem alerts.
• Manage users, groups, Slurm accounts and allocations consistently across venues.
• Oversee node lifecycle: health checks, draining and returning nodes, escalate faults.
• Extend Ansible playbooks and scripts to automate repetitive tasks.
• Patch and harden systems; provide security baselines and evidence for audits.
• Keep runbooks current and participate in on-call rotation after training.

Skills

Linux administration

Bash scripting

Python scripting

Networking

Git and ticket workflow

On-premises infrastructure

Cloud familiarity

NVIDIA GPU tooling

Student cluster/open source

Tools

Ansible

Terraform

Git

nvidia-smi/DCGM

BMC/IPMI

Job description

Parallel Works seeks a Junior HPC Systems Engineer to learn supercomputing operations on production systems. The role starts with monitoring, node health, and account work, then moves into cluster builds and escalations across hybrid on-prem and cloud environments.

Strong Linux fundamentals are required; experience with Slurm and HPC concepts is helpful. The position offers growth into senior roles with hands-on responsibility.