Infrastructure Platform Engineer

Responsibilities

• Design, provision, and operate infrastructure from bare metal upward, including provisioning physical/virtual nodes, deploying and maintaining private cloud platforms (e.g., OpenStack) and virtualization environments (e.g., Proxmox VE), and writing Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Perform general Linux system administration: OS installation and security hardening, patching, package and repository management, storage, networking, backups, and monitoring.
• Automate the full lifecycle of systems and services using configuration management and CI/CD tooling, continually reduce manual operational toil.
• Perform data center activities related to infrastructure under responsibility of this role, such as cabling, installation of physical servers and server components, configuration of out-of-band networking infrastructure, configuration of managed Ethernet switches.
• Deploy, configure, and integrate community and third-party services (e.g., ColdFront, XDMod, Open OnDemand) with existing environments and identity/authentication systems.
• Stand up and maintain observability (metrics, logging, alerting), respond to incidents, and troubleshoot performance, reliability, and configuration issues across the stack.
• Contribute to and maintain internal documentation (procedures, configurations, runbooks, and architecture).
• Independently scope, investigate, and resolve emerging technical challenges.
• Evaluate design alternatives against cost, maintainability, and operational impact.
• Maintains complex system and network administration functions.
• Works with moderate guidance to administer simple systems and assists in the administration of larger systems.
• Ensures integrity by implementing appropriate routine software and hardware solutions.
• Conducts routine hardware and software audits of workstations, backing up all information.
• Performs other related work as needed.

Minimum Qualifications

Education: Minimum requirements include a college or university degree in related field. Work Experience: Minimum requirements include knowledge and skills developed through 2-5 years of work experience in a related job discipline.

Preferred Qualifications

Education: Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.

• Experience deploying and operating a private cloud platform (e.g., OpenStack) from scratch.
• Experience with container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes).
• Experience with provisioning bare-metal infrastructure.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and practices.
• Experience with monitoring/observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• Experience with identity/authentication integration (LDAP, SSO, Kerberos).
• Experience installing, configuring, and maintaining scientific or research software.
• Experience with virtualization (e.g., Proxmox VE, VMware).
• Experience mentoring junior staff or students.

Technical Skills and Knowledge

• Knowledge of Linux administration required, RHEL strongly preferred.
• Solid understanding of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, routing, firewalls, VPNs).
• Proficiency in one or more scripting languages (e.g., Python, Bash).
• Familiarity with community research computing tools (e.g., XDMod, ColdFront, Open OnDemand).
• Understanding of security best practices for system hardening and access control.
• Familiarity with data center work, including server installation and troubleshooting.
• Working knowledge of automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or Salt.

Preferred Competencies

• Understand and translate researchers' scientific goals into computational requirements.
• Excellent written and verbal communication and interpersonal skills.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively with technical and non-technical teams.
• Identify and gain expertise in appropriate new technologies and/or software tools.
• Function as part of an interactive team while demonstrating self-initiative to achieve project's goals and Research Computing Center's mission.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities.

Working Conditions

• Ability to bend, stoop, and crouch in confined spaces.
• Ability to lift, push and pull up to 50 pounds.