Senior Research Computing Systems Software Engineer

Details

Posted : 29-Jul-24

Location : Cambridge, Massachusetts

Type : Full Time

Salary : $115,000 - $125,000

Categories :

Technical (Programmer, Developer, Analyst)

Salary Details :

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Internal Number : 66424BR

Harvard is seeking a Senior Research Computing Systems Software Engineer that will continue to improve operational visibility of the vast FAS Research Computing infrastructure through strong site-reliability practices.

The FASRC infrastructure is core to Science & Engineering, and Public Health research missions supporting over 5,000 researchers.

This position will work within a team of RC Systems Engineers to design, implement, deploy, and maintain advanced monitoring, logging, and alerting systems for mission-critical services.

The Systems Software Engineering group helps maintain core production infrastructure, provisioning, central version control, central logging, and other systems.

This group offers many opportunities to build tools and patterns that help all of Research Computing work better. This is an individual contributor position that will report to the Associate Director of Systems Software Engineering in FAS Research Computing (FASRC).

Faculty of Arts & Sciences Research Computing :

Research Computing at Harvard is an enterprise that continues to reflect the University’s decentralized heritage, the evolution of research-computing infrastructure and funding opportunities, and the strategic development of its central information-technology organization, Harvard University Information Technology (HUIT) and its University Research Computing team.

Starting in 2007, FAS began consolidating and centralizing research-computing resources within the Division of Sciences and soon began expanding across the School as faculty in the social sciences and humanities began to use advanced computing in their research.

The organization came to be called FAS Research Computing and, as more and more faculty across Harvard came to it for support, it extended its services beyond FAS, increasingly in collaboration with HUIT.

With HUIT now developing an array of University- wide services and platforms to support faculty beyond FAS, FAS has the opportunity to strategically redefine what resources and services it will continue to support for the Arts & Sciences at Harvard and to broaden the base of users across the School who are advancing their research through computing.

In this context, FAS Research Computing continues to evolve, to expand its offerings, and to support research faculty across the School and their collaborators around the world.

It has earned a reputation for building partnerships to accelerate research and collaboration. The Director of FAS RC will continue this legacy.

FAS’ research computing team directly engages with researchers through help requests, office hours, training, and in-depth consultations.

FAS resources include a high-performance computing cluster, virtual machines, storage, databases, instrumentation core facility workstations, and other development platforms.

FAS Research Computing has numerous other successful collaborations, including building the MGHPCC (http : / / in Holyoke, MA with leading partner universities.

With these and other institutions, FAS launched the NSF-funded NESE project (http : / / ), which creates a regional cloud storage repository.

Basic Qualifications :

Minimum of seven years’ post-secondary education or relevant work experience

Additional Qualifications :

Demonstrated team performance skills, the ability to communicate clearly, service mindset approach, and the ability to act as a trusted advisor

Strong experience with documentation, mentoring, collaboration, and SRE practices

Strong experience with cloud architecture patterns using AWS or a similar provider, including container scheduling, load balancing, Identity and Access Management, security considerations, and hybrid networking

Broad knowledge of the deployment and management of physical and virtual systems (e.g. storage, cluster computing, network, database, applications)

Experience automating infrastructure with tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Terraform, or similar

Programming skills in any of Ruby, Python, Go, Rust or similar

Experience writing operational tools and forming reproducible patterns

Experience with monitoring systems, writing checks, and creating actionable alerting

Experience with metrics collection to gain insight into production systems

Experience with central log aggregation

Experience with git and version control in general

Experience with Linux system administration

Familiarity with a relational database, like MySQL or PostgreSQL

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