Description
**Position Overview**
The GCF5 Site Reliability Engineer is the senior technical leader for the HPC Enablement pillar. They define and socialize operational standards and patterns, lead multi-team delivery, mentor GCF4 engineers, and translate researcher needs into scalable compute enablement designs. They own pillar-level reliability, performance, cost efficiency, and SLA/SLO outcomes, and influence cross-team engineering quality.
This role reports to the GCF7 leader and partners closely with peer GCF5 domain leads across SCIP to ensure cohesive, scalable platform evolution.
**Core Responsibilities**
+ Own the compute reliability and enablement roadmap within SCIP.
+ Define onboarding playbooks and golden paths for HPC workloads.
+ Establish containerization and reproducible runtime standards.
+ Optimize scheduler configuration and resource allocation policies.
+ Conduct workload profiling and performance tuning.
+ Define and manage SLOs, reliability standards, and operational guardrails.
+ Lead incident response and reduce recurring failures.
+ Mentor engineers and elevate reliability practices.
+ Partner with scientific teams to translate compute requirements into scalable infrastructure patterns.
**Core Competencies**
+ Deep expertise in HPC Enablement (HPC) with evidence of standard‑setting and reuse.
+ Systems design at scale (HPC); performance, security, and observability fundamentals.
+ Product/engineering thinking: road mapping, prioritization, and outcome‑oriented delivery.
+ Stakeholder influence across science, engineering, and governance forums; crisp written/verbal communication.
**Core Success Measures**
+ HPC job success rate improvement.
+ Reduction in MTTR for compute incidents.
+ Performance improvements relative to baseline.
+ Time-to-onboard new scientific workloads.
+ Improvement in cost-per-compute-hour efficiency.
+ Reduction in operational toil via automation.
**Key Relationships**
+ Collaborates with GCF6 Group Lead and cross‑functional leaders (R&D/PD/Dev).
+ Mentors and develops GCF4 Data and Software Engineers, partners with platform, data, ML, and research teams.
+ Interfaces with governance (architecture, security, compliance) and vendor/partner teams.
**Decision Authority**
+ Approve designs within the pillar; define and waive standards/patterns with rationale.
+ Recommend buy‑vs‑build; commit pillar resources to meet SLAs/SLOs; escalate risks.
+ Prioritize pillar backlog and roadmap in alignment with strategy and OKRs.
**Qualifications**
Basic Qualifications:
+ BS+8 / MS+6 / PhD in CS/Engineering/Data disciplines.
+ Demonstrated production delivery experience in HPC at scale.
+ Demonstrated literacy in a relevant scientific domain (e.g., biology, chemistry, therapeutic discovery).
+ Preferred Qualifications:
+ Depth in HPC Enablement (HPC).
+ Kubernetes and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) at scale; observability, performance tuning, and security-by-design.
+ Evidence of standard‑setting and cross‑team influence; mentoring experience.
