Senior Research Computing Lead — Hybrid HPC & Security

University of California - Davis; Davis (CA); Hybrid; USD 108,000 - 213,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work environment

Job summary

University of California, Davis invites applications for a senior Research Computing Lead in LS IT Services, Davis, CA. The role provides technical leadership for research computing infrastructure across the College’s units and partnerships, focusing on sustainable service models, security alignment, and cross-team collaboration to support faculty and researchers.

The position balances research flexibility with institutional security obligations, establishes service tiers, and guides complex

Qualifications

• Advanced experience administering research or infrastructure systems in production or research environments, including installation, configuration, troubleshooting, patching, account/access management, network configuration, storage integration, service management, and lifecycle support for physical servers, virtual machines, workstations, and/or storage platforms across one or more operating systems.
• Demonstrated experience building or operating repeatable systems management practices using automation, configuration management, endpoint management, or scripting tools such as Puppet, Ansible, BigFix, shell scripting, Python, Git, or comparable tools.
• Demonstrated experience implementing security and operational controls for infrastructure, platform, or research systems, including identity and access management, least privilege, vulnerability remediation, endpoint/security tooling, logging, monitoring, backup coordination, incident response, or risk/exception tracking.
• Experience leading complex technical work across multiple stakeholders or teams, including setting technical standards, coordinating implementation work, resolving competing priorities, documenting decisions, and reporting progress, risks, or tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience consulting with customers, researchers, faculty, business partners, or equivalent stakeholders to translate specialized technical requirements into supportable infrastructure, service, or operational solutions.
• Demonstrated knowledge of research computing architecture concepts, including workload placement, system lifecycle management, storage and backup considerations, and the tradeoffs between local infrastructure, shared services, and cloud platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to produce clear technical standards, procedures, inventories, dashboards, or other documentation and to communicate risks, requirements, and recommendations effectively

Responsibilities

• 35% - Research Computing Program Leadership and Service Model Development
• 30% - Research Computing Systems Engineering, Automation, and Standardization
• 20% - Researcher Engagement, Architecture Consultation, and Workload Placement
• 15% - Information Security, Risk, Compliance, and Operational Governance

Skills

System administration

Automation scripts

Security controls

Leadership

Customer consultation

Research computing

Documentation

Research computing support

HPC/Cloud workflows

GPU/AI/ML workflows

Shared storage backup

Security frameworks

ITIL/ITSM

Tools

Puppet

Ansible

BigFix

Python

Git

Job description

University of California, Davis invites applications for a senior Research Computing Lead in LS IT Services, Davis, CA. The role provides technical leadership for research computing infrastructure across the College’s units and partnerships, focusing on sustainable service models, security alignment, and cross-team collaboration to support faculty and researchers.

The position balances research flexibility with institutional security obligations, establishes service tiers, and guides complex