"Research Applications Specialist"

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Competitive salary available based on qualifications, experience and education of the selected candidate.

Information and Technology Services (ITS) is looking for a Research Applications Specialist to join the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) department within ITS. You will improve our world through science and research by use of computational tools such as scientific computing, High Performance Computing (HPC), Big Data (Spark, DBMS), Machine Learning, cloud computing services (AWS, Azure, GCP), Massive Parallelism paradigms (MPI, OpenACC, Accelerators) and more. You will be part of a team supporting all University-wide ARC services and national services such as NSF ACCESS, and, Open Science Grid. Your primary responsibilities will be to build and install open-source and commercial software, and to provide support to users using the same. You will aid researchers in solving their computational problems and workflows. Other responsibilities will include making presentations and providing training to users, writing internal and user documentation, and outreach. You will be comfortable with Linux systems as an advanced user and will have some experience with downloading, compiling, and installing open source software. You will communicate technical concepts to non technical users, and user requirements to ARC and scientific support staff. Many research domains will be encountered, and a willingness to inquire and learn about the computing workflows of the users will be essential. You will report to the Research Experience Manager.

• Configure, compile, and install open source research applications and libraries from source.
• Craft functioning examples, either from examples included with the software, from the internet, or built from scratch for software installed to serve as a guide for users.
• Install and maintain multiple commercial applications such as mathematical and statistical software, math libraries, compilers, debuggers, and profilers.
• Collaborate in evaluating the organization, delivery, and maintenance of software and finding or building improved systems.
• Help validate the performance benchmarking and performance diagnosis of ARC services and systems.
• Assist users with performance, system or other issues related to their use of our systems.
• Assist users in identifying national resources, such as ACCESS, perform testing on those resources, assist preparing computational components of proposals, and assist users in learning to use granted resources.
• Evaluate new, user-facing tools for their potential to improve users' interaction with ARC services and resources that make the services easier to approach.
• Propose better solutions to organize, update, and deliver user facing software.
• Evaluate software development tools that assist users improving performance of their software, e.g., compilers, profilers, and libraries.
• Create and publish documentation including user guides, application-specific web documentation, and documentation for internal programs and procedures.
• Participate in designing and offering workshops and training for ARC and other research computing systems; this may include written assignments, in-person presentation, or video recording.
• Work individually with users to create manageable, well-documented workflows that incorporate or integrate with ARC provided services.
• You will be responsible for designing, building and maintaining HPC software infrastructures and user-facing tools, ensuring optimal performance and reliability in various domains, such as AI/ML applications that run on HPC AI/ML platforms.
• Develop CLI tooling and APIs that users and stakeholders can run to consume and evaluate their workflow metrics
• Contribute and maintain software package management systems
• Collaborate with researchers and Research Software Engineers to ensure seamless integration of HPC resources and scaling of applications.
• Stay up-to-date on the latest advancements of HPC technologies, especially in MPI, AI/ML and best practices

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Linux command line skills
• Two or more years experience providing IT support or working in an academic, research, or scientific focused environment
• Experience with building code from source on Linux systems using common tools such as autoconf, Cmake, and others
• Experience with debugging compiling and linking issues
• Experience with bash shell and python

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degree in an academic field with experience in multistep computational processes, e.g., analyzing ongoing data collection, participation is survey research,