HPC High Performance Computing Lead

Location: Bracknell, United Kingdom; place of work at Jealott's Hill International Research Centre between Bracknell and Maidenhead. Flexible working is offered.

Company

Syngenta Crop Protection develops agricultural and digital solutions for sustainable farming and operates across more than 90 countries.

What you will do

• Own HPC infrastructure covering clusters, GPU provisioning, storage tiers, job scheduling, and notebook infrastructure.
• Define the HPC architecture roadmap, including cluster topology, GPU fleet composition, storage architecture, scheduling strategy, and modern orchestration.
• Lead GPU procurement, capacity planning, vendor and contractor relationships, hardware maintenance, SLA design, budgeting, and strategic infrastructure investment.
• Partner with scientists, computational specialists, and bioinformaticians to translate scientific workloads into infrastructure solutions.
• Establish performance metrics, KPIs, optimization targets, capacity forecasts, documentation, runbooks, security controls, compliance standards, and disaster recovery procedures.
• Lead, mentor, and develop engineering teams while communicating HPC strategy and recommendations to executive and cross-functional stakeholders.

Requirements

• Expert-level HPC infrastructure experience, including cluster management, NVIDIA GPU provisioning with A100/H100-generation hardware, MPI, Lustre, NFS, object storage, and job scheduling.
• Expert understanding of GPU architecture, including generations, interconnects such as NVLink and InfiniBand, memory profiles, and implications for scientific workloads.
• Strong experience with modern orchestration and the architectural transition toward Kubernetes-native HPC environments, including GPU operators and Kubernetes scheduler extensions.
• Strong strategic capability in maintenance and support strategies, vendor contract evaluation, hardware investment management, and build-versus-buy decisions.
• Ability to understand scientific workloads and work credibly with computational scientists and bioinformaticians.
• Strong proficiency with AI-assisted engineering tools as a primary workflow for infrastructure automation.
• Demonstrated experience managing and mentoring technical teams and building high-performing engineering organizations.
• Expertise in budget planning, financial forecasting, strategic procurement, performance metrics, KPI monitoring, capacity forecasting, and resource utilization analysis.
• Strong background in documentation, operational runbooks, and knowledge management for complex technical environments.

Nice to have

• Experience in agriculture, life sciences, scientific computing, or regulated enterprise environments.
• Experience building platforms, products, or services used by multiple internal teams.
• Experience in distributed, international engineering organizations.
• Familiarity with scientific computing frameworks and libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and HPC libraries.
• Background in enterprise security protocols, compliance standards, and disaster recovery.
• Experience communicating complex technical concepts to executive stakeholders and cross-functional teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Permanent position with flexible working.
• Generous pension scheme, bonus scheme, private medical insurance, and life insurance.
• Up to 31.5 days of annual holiday.
• International, science-focused environment with learning and training opportunities.
• Work alongside scientists at a global agricultural research and development site.