Senior HPC DevOps Engineer

LCAT: IE3

Salary Range: $222-257K

Location: College Park, MD

Security Clearance Required: TS/SCI with MD polygraph

Job Description:

We are seeking a fully cleared Senior HPC DevOps Engineer to own the operations and automation lifecycle for an existing HPC/AI compute cluster (Linux). You will work closely with team members, as well as directly with our Maryland-based customer, in a fast-paced environment. In this role you will codify repeatable operations in Ansible and drive execution through an enterprise automation controller to enforce desired state, detect drift, accelerate node onboarding, and streamline incident response via runbook automation integrated with monitoring and ITSM.

Key Responsibilities may include:

• Automation ownership: Job templates, inventories, credentials, RBAC, execution environments, promotion across environments.
• Desired-state and drift detection: Enforce desired state across cluster services via code-driven configuration; implement drift detection and alert on deviations; reconcile runtime state vs configured state.
• Compute node onboarding (Bare-metal/VM): Build and maintain an automated node bootstrap workflow that installs/configures the OS, applies security and performance baselines, enrolls nodes into the scheduler and shared storage ecosystem, validates hardware and service readiness (CPU, network, accelerator, storage mounts), and reports pass/fail results.
• Patch & vulnerability response: Implement rolling maintenance and patch automation to meet defined vulnerability response SLAs.
• Maintain version-controlled container build definitions and integrate image scanning into the build/release lifecycle.
• Logging & observability: Ensure automation and operational workflows emit auditable logs to centralized analytics and integrate with metrics/alerting to enable reliable incident response, proactive detection, and safe auto-remediation.
• Incident/problem management: Automate responses to common incidents (hung nodes, storage performance alarms, image vulnerabilities, hardware failures) leveraging out-of-band hardware management interfaces and standardized runbooks.
• Docs-as-code: Keep runbooks and operational documentation versioned alongside automation and publish operator guidance to the orgs documentation platform.

Required qualifications

12+ years of experience and a BS in computer science, IT, or related technical field, MS and 10 years of experience, or a Ph.D. with 8 years of experience. Four years of additional experience is required in lieu of a Bachelors’ degree for a total of 16 years of experience.

7+ years in Linux systems / SRE / DevOps, including production cluster operations in an HPC or large-scale compute environment.

3+ years of experience building and operating Ansible automation at scale (roles/collections, idempotency, inventories, secrets).

Strong Linux hardening & compliance fundamentals (SELinux/AppArmor, SSH key automation, baseline config management).

Demonstrated experience operating or automating clustered compute environments (HPC, large Linux farms, or similar).

Hands-on experience with container tooling in Linux environments, including image lifecycle/versioning.

Familiarity with incident response and runbook-driven operations; ability to automate common remediations.

Strong Git workflow and documentation practices.

Must hold at least one active/current technical certification from the following-

• Systems engineering (e.g., INCOSE)
• Information security (e.g., CISSP)
• Networking (e.g., CCNA)
• System Administration (e.g., RHCE, MCSE)
• Virtualization (e.g., VCP)
• IT systems management (e.g., ITIL)
• Project management (e.g., PMP, Agile)

This position requires an active/current TS/SCI w/ Polygraph.

Preferred qualifications

Bare-metal provisioning experience (PXE/iPXE, Kickstart/Preseed, Foreman/MAAS) and hardware OOB management.

CI/testing for automation and promotion pipelines for playbooks

Experience with tuned performance profiles, HPC performance troubleshooting, and GPU node health validation.

Experience generation operational documentation from repos (Confluence).

Benefits:

We offer a very competitive benefits package because we care about our employees. Our offerings including:

• Four (4) weeks paid time
• Eleven Paid Holidays
• 401k plan with 4% employer contributions and immediate vesting plus annual 3% contribution
• Annual Bonuses for performance
• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance
• Education and Training budget provided
• Technical Certification and coursework budget for computer/program expenses
• Gym Membership Reimbursement
• Amazon Prime Membership Reimbursement
• Birthday Club
• Capstone Swag