Information Technology Architect

Position Description:

Position Summary

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a prestigious research and development organization that plays a vital role in the study of the universe. Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) is a nonprofit organization that manages and operates the NRAO under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The Observatory is a hub for technological and scientific collaboration, operating state-of-the-art radio telescope facilities for use by the international scientific community. The Observatory has been instrumental in the study of black holes, galaxies, and the early universe.

NRAO is seeking an experienced Enterprise IT Technology Architect. The Information Technology Architect provides strategic and technical architectural leadership for the infrastructure and platform ecosystem that enables the NRAO’s scientific mission. This position is responsible for defining, designing, and guiding the implementation of scalable, resilient, high-performance technology architectures supporting scientific computing, large-scale data processing, high-capacity storage, advanced networking, and geographically distributed research infrastructure.

Working collaboratively with the observatory's Enterprise IT Teams, Software Architect, and Data Architect, the Technology Architect will establish the long-term technical direction necessary to support current scientific operations and the next generation of radio telescopes. The position will play a critical role in developing technology strategies and architectural solutions capable of supporting increasingly computationally intensive scientific workloads, high-volume data movement, and the generation, processing, storage, and preservation of petabyte-scale scientific datasets.

The successful candidate will possess extensive experience architecting and implementing large-scale enterprise and high-performance computing infrastructure, with particular depth in high-performance storage architectures, and advanced networking technologies. This individual must demonstrate the ability to evaluate emerging technologies, translate complex scientific and computational requirements into actionable architectural designs, and guide technical decisions that balance performance, scalability, reliability, operational sustainability, and total cost of ownership.

This position will be based in Albuquerque, NM, Socorro, NM, Charlottesville, VA or Green Bank, WV. For well-qualified candidates, a remote work arrangement may be considered.

What You Will be Doing

The duties and responsibilities of the CISO will include, but are not limited to:

• Develop and maintain enterprise technology architectures, standards, principles, and reference designs for scientific computing and supporting infrastructure.
• Assist the technical teams in EIT in developing working designs for infrastructure and platform that meet the scientific requirements for usability, availability, capacity, and performance.
• Establish architectural roadmaps addressing near-term operational requirements and long-term scientific computing demands over 12-, 24-, and 36-month planning horizons and beyond.
• Collaborate with Enterprise IT Teams, Software, and Data Architects to ensure alignment between infrastructure capabilities, application architectures, scientific data workflows, and data management strategies.
• Translate scientific requirements, computational workload characteristics, and anticipated data growth into infrastructure designs and implementation strategies.
• Lead technical evaluations, architectural tradeoff analyses, technology selection, and infrastructure modernization initiatives.
• Develop architectural documentation, including conceptual, logical, and physical designs, technology standards, integration specifications, and implementation recommendations.
• Evaluate infrastructure solutions against performance, availability, security, interoperability, scalability, and lifecycle cost requirements.
• Provide architectural guidance to engineering and operations teams responsible for implementing, administering, and supporting infrastructure platforms.
• Other duties may be assigned.

Work Environment

The successful candidate will join a team of professionals engaged in research and development in the fields of science, engineering, software development, and education. Work is typically performed in a research or development environment. Must be able to operate a personal computer. Occasional travel (domestic and international) may be required.

Who You Are:

Education

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related technical discipline, or an equivalent combination of education and relevant professional experience.

Experience

• Overall a minimum of ten years of progressively responsible experience in enterprise infrastructure engineering, high-performance computing, large-scale networking, storage engineering, or related technical disciplines.
• Minimum of five years of experience designing or architecting complex, large-scale infrastructure environments.

Required Skills, Competencies and Experience

• Demonstrated experience designing, implementing, or providing architectural leadership for high-capacity storage and high-bandwidth network infrastructure.
• Experience supporting mission-critical, research computing, scientific, or similarly demanding data-intensive environments.

The following are highly preferred:

• Experience architecting infrastructure for scientific research institutions, national laboratories, supercomputing centers, or other large-scale research environments.
• Experience with petabyte-scale parallel file systems, particularly Lustre, IBM Storage Scale, BeeGFS, or similar platforms.
• Experience with large-scale object storage technologies such as Ceph or comparable distributed storage platforms.
• Experience with Slurm, Kubernetes, Apptainer, or similar technologies used in HPC environments.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management technologies such as Ansible, Terraform, and comparable platforms.
• Experience developing architectural strategies for exabyte-scale data growth, long-term scientific archives, and geographically distributed data processing environments.
• Experience participating in technology acquisition, vendor evaluation, technical procurement, and major infrastructure investment planning.
• Working understanding of application development, data, data warehousing architecture

Additional Requirement

Observatory employees must be authorized to work in the United States. The Observatory presently cannot sponsor H-1B Visas for this position.

Total Rewards:

Compensation

The starting salary of this position is between $130,000 and $160,000. Factors which may affect starting pay within this range may include; education, experience, skills, competencies, other qualifications of the successful candidate, as well as internal equity and labor market conditions.

Benefits:

Associated Universities, Inc (AUI) offers a comprehensive benefits package addressing the needs of employees and their families with most benefits beginning on the first day of employment, subject to eligibility requirements. AUI provides:

• Excellent paid time off (13 holidays, annual accrual of up to 24 vacation days)
• Medical, dental and vision plans are effective on the first day of employment.
• AUI’s retirement benefit contributes an amount equal to 10 percent of a qualified participant’s base pay with no required employee contribution.
• Click Total Rewards for more information.

Application Instructions:

Select the “Apply” button above. Please be prepared to upload your current CV/Resume and a cover letter describing interest and suitability for the position.

Equal Opportunity Employer Statement:

AUI is an equal opportunity employer. To view our complete statement, please visit https://public.nrao.edu/careers/. If you require reasonable accommodation for any part of the application or hiring process, you may submit your request by sending an email to resumes@nrao.edu. PM20