We are seeking a highly skilled Principal Engineer – HPC Operations to oversee the daily operations and support of high-performance computing clusters designed to power large-scale AI and ML workloads. This role ensures stable, secure, and high-performing infrastructure leveraging technologies such as Slurm, Kubernetes, and modern MLOps platforms. The ideal candidate will bring deep technical expertise in HPC and a strong operational mindset to drive continuous improvement and automation across globally distributed environments.
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Key Responsibilities
- Oversee the daily operational management of HPC infrastructure, including compute, storage, networking, and scheduler components (e.g., Slurm, Kubernetes, etc.).
- Drive efforts to optimize the efficiency and performance of HPC systems, ensuring maximum resource utilization and minimizing downtime.
- Serve as the primary technical contact for planned HPC deployments in scope.
- Serve as the primary technical escalation point for L2 support teams, ensuring rapid and effective resolution of incidents and service requests.
- Continuously monitor system health, performance, and resource utilization using advanced monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, DCGM).
- Manage user environments for AI/ML workloads, including container orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and workflow tools (e.g., MLflow, Kubeflow).
- Define and enforce job scheduling policies, priorities, and partitions within Slurm and/or Kubernetes environments to ensure resource fairness, efficiency, and workload optimization.
- Lead root cause analysis (RCA) of operational issues, contributing to post-mortem documentation and driving continuous improvement initiatives.
- Provide mentorship and technical guidance to junior engineers, fostering skills development and knowledge sharing across teams.
- Participate in on-call rotation as necessary.
- Ensure adherence to security and operational policies, assisting in audits and maintaining documentation for change and incident management processes.
Requirements
- Minimum of 8 years of experience in HPC operations, systems engineering, or DevOps roles, with at least 2 years in a leadership or ownership capacity.
- Advanced expertise in configuring, optimizing, and maintaining complex HPC environments, including hardware, software, and storage systems.
- Hands-on experience managing Slurm clusters and/or Kubernetes-based environments for AI/ML workloads.
- In-depth knowledge of GPU resource management, workload schedulers, and performance tuning for AI/ML workloads.
- Proficiency with monitoring and observability frameworks such as Prometheus, Grafana, and DCGM.
- Strong scripting and automation skills, including Python, Bash, Ansible, and Terraform.
- Solid understanding of Linux (RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu), networking technologies (RDMA, InfiniBand, RoCE), and storage solutions (NFS, Lustre, Ceph).
