Company: University of Birmingham
Location:
Job Description:
Overview
As a senior technical leader in Advanced Research Computing (ARC), you will shape and oversee BEAR-based research platforms (HPC, HTC, cloud, storage) and guide a small AIS team. You’ll align infrastructure with ARC and University priorities, ensure high reliability, and engage with researchers and external partners. The role combines strategic design, project leadership, and hands-on technical delivery to enable computationally and data-intensive research. It offers a meaningful opportunity to drive innovation in national and regional research ecosystems.
Pay / Benefits
- 40 days holiday per year
- one paid volunteering day per year
- occupational sick pay
- pension scheme
- three subsidised day nurseries
- flexible working arrangements
Responsibilities
- Lead renewal, upgrade and expansion of BEAR infrastructure across HPC, HTC, cloud, storage and networking
- Oversee secure, high-performance operation and incident management for ARC’s research infrastructure
- Line manage and develop a small team of Infrastructure Engineers
- Provide technical leadership in BEAR service design and integration across multiple platforms
- Design major infrastructure components with multi-year investment planning and lifecycle costing
- Advise senior committees and researchers, contribute to funding proposals
- Manage external relationships with suppliers and research partners
- Evaluate and adopt new technologies to keep BEAR services competitive
- Lead complex infrastructure and research technology projects
- Develop detailed technical specifications considering performance, cost, sustainability, risk
Key requirements
- Degree level education or equivalent professional experience
- Progressively responsible technical roles with demonstrable development
- Evidence of literacy and numeracy suitable for the role
- Authoritative expertise in research computing infrastructure
- Experience delivering large-scale, leading-edge infrastructure for computational or data-intensive research
- Experience with HPC, large-scale storage, high-speed networking, or private cloud (OpenStack)
- Linux system administration experience
- Automation and DevOps experience (CI/CD, configuration management, IaC)
- Broad understanding of compute, storage, networking, security, IAM, software environments and data science workflows
- Experience with public cloud for research workloads and national/international research infrastructure is desirable
- Strong communication, stakeholder engagement and leadership abilities
- Ability to manage priorities and lead junior staff
- Commitment to structured delivery, ITIL/Agile practices and continuous professional development
- Experience with equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace
- Excellent communication
- Leadership and mentoring
- Collaborative approach in multidisciplinary teams
- High Performance Computing (HPC) systems
- Large-scale storage and data services (multi-petabyte)
- High-speed, low-latency networking
…
Posted: September 14th, 2026