Senior Manager, HPC Engineering

Job Summary

Mass General Brigham Digital supports the clinical, operational, research, and academic missions through secure, reliable, and user-centered technology services. Digital Research Operations provides specialized platforms, infrastructure, and support services that enable investigators, research staff, trainees, and collaborators to conduct data-intensive biomedical research across Mass General Brigham. Join our scientific computing team and help researchers unlock the potential of a new, world-class high-performance computing platform.

The Senior Manager, HPC Engineering leads the engineering, architecture, reliability, operations, technical roadmap, and ongoing evolution of our high-performance computing environment. This role is accountable for the technical health of the environment, including compute hardware, high-speed networking, storage, operating systems, configuration management, scientific software stacks, researcher-facing applications, automation, monitoring, incident response, and operational readiness. The Senior Manager serves as the senior technical owner for HPC and partners closely with the Senior Manager, HPC Researcher Experience to ensure the environment is reliable, scalable, secure, well-documented, and aligned with current and future researcher needs.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy, operating model, reliability, and continuous improvement of the HPC platform, including compute, storage, networking, operating systems, configuration, software, automation, monitoring, and operational standards.
• Own the HPC platform architecture and technical roadmap, ensuring that compute, storage, networking, software, automation, security, data adjacency, enclave capabilities, and operational capabilities evolve to meet current and future research needs.
• Lead engineering activities for HPC hardware, GPU and CPU compute nodes, high-speed interconnects, storage systems, network connectivity, operating system images, firmware, drivers, configuration management, and platform lifecycle management.
• Own the scientific computing software environment, including schedulers, modules, containers, compilers, libraries, researcher applications, Open OnDemand, and other tools required to support data-intensive biomedical research workloads.
• Own workload management practices for the HPC environment, including scheduler configuration, queues, partitions, job policies, GPU and CPU allocation, fair-share models, utilization optimization, and performance tuning.
• Lead benchmarking and performance engineering practices, including workload profiling, bottleneck analysis, system tuning, baseline benchmark development, vendor performance validation, and evaluation of emerging technologies to improve platform performance and researcher productivity.
• Lead capacity planning and platform lifecycle planning, including utilization forecasting, hardware refresh planning, storage growth analysis, procurement input, and recommendations for future platform investments.
• Own change, release, and configuration management practices for the HPC platform, ensuring that system updates, software deployments, security patches, configuration changes, and maintenance activities are planned, tested, documented, and communicated.
• Establish engineering practices for platform resilience and operational continuity, including backup and recovery coordination, maintenance planning, runbooks, recovery procedures, change controls, and incident readiness.
• Develop and mature automation for user provisioning, storage provisioning, access controls, environment configuration, software deployment, monitoring, alerting, reporting, and routine operational tasks.
• Oversee data movement and workflow integration capabilities, including Globus, data transfer services, connectivity to storage platforms, integration with research data workflows, and coordination with cloud, storage, data adjacency, enclave, and institutional data services.
• Manage the Managed Services partner relationship, including operational expectations, service quality, incident coordination, vendor coordination, maintenance planning, escalation management, performance review, and continuous improvement.
• Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex HPC platform issues, coordinating troubleshooting, root cause analysis, remediation, communications, and follow-up actions across internal teams, managed services partners, and vendors.
• Partner with the Senior Manager, HPC Researcher Experience to translate researcher needs, support trends, usage patterns, and service feedback into platform improvements, roadmap priorities, documentation updates, and operational changes.
• Establish and track platform health measures, including availability, performance, capacity, utilization, incident trends, storage growth, software demand, automation effectiveness, and risks to reliability or scalability.
• Partner with security, compliance, identity, networking, infrastructure, storage, cloud, and vendor teams to ensure the HPC platform aligns with organizational standards for security, privacy, access management, resilience, and risk management.
• Partner with security and compliance teams to mature HPC security engineering practices, including vulnerability management, patching, access controls, audit logging, identity integration, secure configuration, and risk remediation.
• Lead, coach, and develop engineering staff, consultants, managed services contributors, and other technical partners, setting clear expectations for reliability, documentation, operational discipline, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Perform other duties and responsibilities as assigned.

Essential Functions

• Direct responsibility for the development, prototyping and delivery of applications, including roadmaps, for applications in the assigned domain.
• Develop new and expand existing frameworks, approaches, and techniques to advance the development of platforms.
• Effectively manage the development backlog and roadmap for digital platforms.
• Lead continuous service improvement and ongoing process maturity through regular reviews of the process and tools, trend analysis and metrics reporting and through regular engagement with stakeholders.
• Lead, recruit and develop a team(s) of software engineers, release managers and other team members.
• Provide direction and goal setting on platform strategy and development operations.

Qualifications

Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, computational science, biomedical informatics, or a related field required; advanced degree preferred. Equivalent experience may be accepted in lieu of a degree.

Experience: 8+ years of related technical experience in platform development years required. 2+ years of leadership experience in engineering required.

• Minimum of seven to ten years of progressive experience in high performance computing, research infrastructure, scientific computing platforms, Linux systems engineering, storage, networking, or related infrastructure environments.
• Minimum of four years of people management, technical leadership, infrastructure operations leadership, vendor management, or platform engineering leadership experience required.
• Strong working knowledge of HPC architecture, Linux operating systems, schedulers, high-speed networking, parallel file systems, storage platforms, GPUs, CPUs, drivers, firmware, configuration management, monitoring, automation, data movement, data adjacency, enclave capabilities, and secure multi-user computing environments.
• Experience supporting scientific software environments, including schedulers, modules, containers, compilers, MPI libraries, GPU software stacks, Open OnDemand, Globus or other data transfer tools, researcher applications, and software lifecycle practices in multi-user scientific computing environments.
• Experience managing managed services providers, vendors, consultants, service-level expectations, incident coordination, maintenance planning, performance reviews, and escalations in complex technical environments.
• Demonstrated ability to lead platform operations, improve reliability, manage incidents, analyze root causes, plan capacity, reduce operational risk, and mature engineering practices using metrics and operational data.
• Knowledge of security, HIPAA and privacy principles, compliance, identity and access management, and risk management practices relevant to healthcare or academic research environments preferred.
• Familiarity within an Agile/SCRUM process.

Working Model

1-4 days per week onsite at Assembly Row in Somerville, MA, with an average of at least four days on-site per month. A quiet, secure, compliant workspace is required for remote workdays, and will be viewed and confirmed via Microsoft Teams Video on day 1 for all remote and/or hybrid hires. MGB will ensure that candidates have a HIPAA-compliant workspace.