Senior HPC DevOPS Engineer | TS/SCI w/MD poly required

Power3; College Park (MD); On-site; USD 222,000 - 257,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Four weeks paid time off

11 paid holidays

401k with employer contributions

Annual performance bonuses

Medical, Dental, Vision insurance

Education and training budget

Certification budget for computer/tech

Job summary

Power3 seeks a Senior HPC DevOps Engineer to own operations for a large HPC/AI compute cluster in Maryland. You will codify repeatable tasks with Ansible and drive deployment, patching, and incident response through an enterprise automation controller.

The role requires a TS/SCI clearance with MD polygraph and strong Linux/hardening foundations. You will work with Maryland-based customers, implementing drift detection, node onboarding, and runbook-driven automation to ensure reliability and

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in HPC/DevOps environments.
• 7+ years in Linux systems / SRE / DevOps.
• 3+ years building and operating Ansible at scale.
• Strong Linux hardening and compliance fundamentals.
• Experience with clustered compute environments (HPC/large Linux farms).
• Hands-on experience with container tooling in Linux, including image lifecycle.
• Familiarity with incident response and runbook-driven operations.

Responsibilities

• Own operations and automation lifecycle for an HPC compute cluster.
• Code-driven configuration and drift detection across cluster services.
• Automate node bootstrap, OS provisioning, and security baselines.
• Maintain patch automation and image scanning within CI/CD.
• Ensure auditable logs and integration with monitoring for incident response.
• Automate remediation for common incidents using runbooks.

Job description

Senior HPC DevOPS Engineer | TS/SCI w/MD poly required

• Hanover, MD

LCAT: IE3

Salary Range: $222- 257K

Location: College Park, MD

Security Clearance Required: TS/SCI with MD polygraph

Job Description:

We are seeking a fully cleared Senior HPC DevOps Engineer to own the operations and automation lifecycle for an existing HPC/AI compute cluster (Linux). You will work closely with team members, as well as directly with our Maryland-based customer, in a fast-paced environment. In this role you will codify repeatable operations in Ansible and drive execution through an enterprise automation controller to enforce desired state, detect drift, accelerate node onboarding, and streamline incident response via runbook automation integrated with monitoring and ITSM.

Key Responsibilities

Desired-state and drift detection: Enforce desired state across cluster services via code-driven configuration; implement drift detection and alert on deviations; reconcile runtime state vs configured state.

Compute node onboarding (Bare-metal/VM): Build and maintain an automated node bootstrap workflow that installs/configures the OS, applies security and performance baselines, enrolls nodes into the scheduler and shared storage ecosystem, validates hardware and service readiness (CPU, network, accelerator, storage mounts), and reports pass/fail results.

Patch & vulnerability response: Implement rolling maintenance and patch automation to meet defined vulnerability response SLAs. Maintain version-controlled container build definitions and integrate image scanning into the build/release lifecycle.

Logging & observability: Ensure automation and operational workflows emit auditable logs to centralized analytics and integrate with metrics/alerting to enable reliable incident response, proactive detection, and safe auto-remediation.

Incident/problem management: Automate responses to common incidents (hung nodes, storage performance alarms, image vulnerabilities, hardware failures) leveraging out-of-band hardware management interfaces and standardized runbooks.

Docs-as-code: Keep runbooks and operational documentation versioned alongside automation and publish operator guidance to the orgs documentation platform.

Required qualifications

12+ years of experience and a BS in computer science, IT, or related technical field, MS and 10 years of experience, or a Ph.D. with 8 years of experience. Four years of additional experience is required in lieu of a Bachelors’ degree for a total of 16 years of experience.

7+ years in Linux systems / SRE / DevOps, including production cluster operations in an HPC or large-scale compute environment.

3+ years of experience building and operating Ansible automation at scale (roles/collections, idempotency, inventories, secrets).

Strong Linux hardening & compliance fundamentals (SELinux/AppArmor, SSH key automation, baseline config management).

Demonstrated experience operating or automating clustered compute environments (HPC, large Linux farms, or similar).

Hands‑on experience with container tooling in Linux environments, including image lifecycle/versioning.

Familiarity with incident response and runbook-driven operations; ability to automate common remediations.

Strong Git workflow and documentation practices.

Must hold at least one active/current technical certification from the following-

• Information security (e.g., CISSP)
• Networking (e.g., CCNA)
• System Administration (e.g., RHCE, MCSE)
• IT systems management (e.g., ITIL)

This position requires an active/current TS/SCI w/ Polygraph.

Preferred qualifications

• Bare-metal provisioning experience (PXE/iPXE, Kickstart/Preseed, Foreman/MAAS) and hardware OOB management.
• CI/testing for automation and promotion pipelines for playbooks
• Experience with tuned performance profiles, HPC performance troubleshooting, and GPU node health validation.
• Experience generation operational documentation from repos (Confluence).

Benefits

• Four (4) weeks paid time
• Eleven Paid Holidays
• 401k plan with 4% employer contributions and immediate vesting plus annual 3% contruibution
• Annual Bonuses for performance
• Medical, Dental, and Vision and insurance
• Education and Training budget provided
• Technical Certification and coursework budget for computer/program expenses