HPC Linux System Administrator

Location: Onsite at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, USA; fully remote may be considered for candidates with strong, demonstrated HPC administration experience.

Company

hirify.global supports NASA's Johnson Space Center under the JETS II contract, including the Flight Sciences Laboratory's mission-critical HPC environment.

What you will do

• Administer and improve a production HPC cluster supporting NASA human spaceflight programs.
• Operate the HPC job scheduler, including partition and QOS configuration, accounting, node states, and troubleshooting failed or stuck jobs.
• Administer the high-speed parallel filesystem and support a cluster environment with 700+ machines, 26,000 cores, and more than 10 petabytes of storage.
• Package and run user software environments with HPC containers, including older operating-system and package versions.
• Build and support CI/CD workflows running on cluster run nodes, including Jacamar.
• Collaborate with engineers and scientists while monitoring, configuring, and maintaining on-premises infrastructure.

Requirements

• Production experience administering an HPC scheduler such as Slurm, PBS/Torque, or LSF; submitting jobs alone does not qualify.
• Production experience administering a high-speed parallel filesystem such as Lustre or GPFS/Spectrum Scale; general NAS, SAN, or NFS administration is not a substitute.
• At least 5 years of Linux system administration experience in on-premises, bare-metal, or cluster/research-computing environments, including at least 2 years of HPC administration. Cloud-only or DevOps-only experience does not meet the requirement.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent certification in a related field, typically with at least 5 years of experience.
• Experience using Apptainer/Singularity or Podman containers in an HPC setting.
• Experience building and supporting CI/CD workflows, preferably on HPC clusters and run nodes.
• Experience with system configuration management, monitoring, and alerting.
• Strong problem-solving, planning, and communication skills; ability to work collaboratively.
• Proof of U.S. citizenship or U.S. permanent residency and completion of a U.S. government background investigation are required.

Nice to have

• Red Hat-based Linux distributions, including RHEL, Rocky, or Alma.
• InfiniBand, xCAT or Warewulf, Ansible, Foreman, log consolidation, monitoring tools, Git, and GitLab CI/CD.
• Jacamar or comparable tooling for CI/CD jobs on HPC clusters and run nodes.
• AI applications in system administration, operational workflows, automation, or user-facing HPC jobs.
• MPI administration, including Open MPI, MPICH, or Intel MPI.
• Package management and environment modules, including Lmod, Environment Modules, SPACK, or EasyBuild.
• NASA security mechanisms, including security plans, POAMs, ATOs, and risk assessments.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employment with medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• Paid time off and a 401(k) plan.
• 9/80 work schedule with every other Friday off when applicable.
• Hands-on work in an on-premises, mission-critical NASA computing environment rather than a public-cloud, DevOps-only, or Kubernetes-only role.
• The position may be considered at different levels depending on experience and business needs.

Hiring process

• Most federal-contractor positions require obtaining and maintaining a U.S. government background investigation.
• MRI conducts a pre-screening background check for candidates who receive an employment offer.