Junior HPC Systems Engineer

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

Short term disability

Generous paid vacation

Generous sick time

Job summary

Parallel Works is hiring a Junior HPC Systems Engineer to learn supercomputing operations on production systems. The role starts with monitoring, node health, and account and allocation work, and moves into cluster builds and escalations.

The systems are hybrid: on-premises clusters the customer owns, accredited Government cloud regions, and commercial GPU providers, often in the same day. We are looking for strong Linux fundamentals and interest in how large systems behave.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of hands-on Linux administration (RHEL/ Rocky/ Alma, Debian/Ubuntu).
• Understanding HPC fundamentals: batch scheduling, shared filesystems, MPI job launch.
• Bash and Python scripting for operational work.
• Practical networking: DNS, routing, firewalls, SSH keys, bastion access.
• Git and ticket-driven workflow; clear written communication.
• Interest in on-premises estate: bare metal, out-of-band consoles, site networking.
• US citizenship and eligibility for Secret clearance; active clearance helpful.

Responsibilities

• Monitor cluster health, node state, queue behavior, and alerting; take initial action on node failures and file system alerts.
• Manage accounts and Slurm allocations; keep users and groups consistent across venues.
• Oversee node lifecycle: health checks, draining, returning nodes, escalation paths.
• Extend Ansible playbooks and operational scripts; automate repetitive steps.
• Patch and harden systems; document baselines; accompany security review.
• Maintain runbooks and participate in on-call rotation after training.

Job description

About Parallel Works

Parallel Works builds and operates ACTIVATE, a control plane for high performance computing and AI. Our customers run large scientific and AI workloads across their own on-premises clusters, Government and commercial cloud, and commercial GPU providers, and ACTIVATE gives them one way in to all of it. The high security boundary is authorized at Impact Level 5, with FIPS validated cryptography and STIG hardening throughout.

About Parallel Works

Parallel Works builds and operates ACTIVATE, a control plane for high performance computing and AI. Our customers run large scientific and AI workloads across their own on-premises clusters, Government and commercial cloud, and commercial GPU providers, and ACTIVATE gives them one way in to all of it. The high security boundary is authorized at Impact Level 5, with FIPS validated cryptography and STIG hardening throughout.

The work reaches most fields that depend on computing at scale: weather and climate forecasting, defense and intelligence programs, aerospace and structural analysis, molecular and materials science, energy, and AI research. A quarter here can include standing up a GPU cluster for one of those communities, federating a laboratory's existing on-premises system with burst capacity it did not have before, and getting a domain code written decades ago to run on current hardware.

Customer success sets our priorities. We are a small engineering company, so engineers here work directly with the people using the systems and carry a problem from the first report through to the fix. This is what we call mission engineering: understanding what a customer is trying to accomplish and why the computing matters to it.

About The Role

Parallel Works is hiring a Junior HPC Systems Engineer to learn supercomputing operations on production systems. The role starts with monitoring, node health, and account and allocation work, and moves into cluster builds and escalations.

The systems are hybrid: on-premises clusters the customer owns, accredited Government cloud regions, and commercial GPU providers, often in the same day. We are looking for strong Linux fundamentals and interest in how large systems behave. Running a supercomputer is not a prerequisite. The role leads into senior systems engineering, with cluster builds handled independently after about a year.

What you will do

• Monitor and respond: cluster health, node state, queue behavior, and alerting, with first action on node failures, stuck jobs, and filesystem alerts.
• Accounts and allocations: users, groups, Slurm accounts, and allocations, kept consistent across venues.
• Node lifecycle: health checks on GPU and CPU nodes, draining and returning nodes, and the escalation path on faults, which is site staff or a vendor on customer hardware and a support case on cloud capacity.
• Automation: extend Ansible playbooks and operational scripts, and replace the manual steps you find yourself repeating.
• Patching and hardening: patches and hardening baselines under senior review, plus scan evidence for the security package.
• Documentation and on call: keep runbooks current, and join the on call rotation once trained into it.

Requirements

• 2 or more years of hands-on Linux administration. RHEL, Rocky, or Alma, or Debian and Ubuntu; we run both families and you will work on both.
• Understanding of HPC fundamentals: batch scheduling, shared filesystems, MPI job launch, and what makes a compute node healthy.
• Bash and Python scripting for operational work.
• Practical networking: DNS, routing, firewalls, SSH keys, bastion access.
• Git and a ticket driven workflow, and clear written communication.
• Interest in the on-premises side of the estate, meaning bare metal, out of band consoles, and site networking.
• United States citizenship and eligibility for a Secret clearance, since the work reaches export controlled Government environments. An active clearance is helpful but not required. We sponsor candidates who are eligible but not currently cleared.

Preferred Qualifications

• Any exposure to Slurm, PBS Pro, or LSF.
• Experience with Ansible, Terraform, or another configuration management tool.
• Time in any public cloud, and with NVIDIA GPU tooling such as nvidia-smi or DCGM.
• Time with physical servers: racking, BMC or IPMI consoles, firmware, or a home lab with hardware in it.
• Involvement in a student cluster competition, a university HPC support role, or open source contributions.

Benefits

• Medical coverage
• Vision coverage
• Dental coverage
• 401(k) with company match
• Short term disability
• Generous paid vacation
• Generous sick time

Equal employment opportunity

Parallel Works is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.