Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Compute Environment - Senior Systems Administrator

Competition 1148

This competition is open to all applicants however; internal candidates and applicants who were former employees of the University of Alberta in the past 18 months will be given priority consideration before external candidates. Please log in to verify your internal candidate status.

This position is a part of the Non-Academic Staff Association (NASA).

This position offers a comprehensive benefits package which can be viewed at: Faculty & Staff Benefits.

Location - Work primarily takes place at North Campus, Edmonton.

Working for the Department of Information Services & Technology at the University of Alberta

The University of Alberta is teeming with change makers, community builders, and world shapers who lead with purpose each and every day. We are home to more than 40,000 students in 200+ undergraduate and 500+ graduate programs, over 13,000 faculty and staff, 260,000 alumni worldwide and have been recognized as one of Canada’s Greenest Employers for over a decade.

The University of Alberta is committed to an equitable, diverse, and inclusive workforce. We welcome applications from all qualified persons. We encourage women; First Nations, Métis and Inuit persons; members of visible minority groups; persons with disabilities; persons of any sexual orientation or gender identity and expression; and all those who may contribute to the further diversification of ideas and the University to apply.

Information Services & Technology (IST) is the central support group for the university's technological landscape. IST plays a pivotal role in ensuring the evolution and smooth operation of technology for teaching, learning, research and working at the University of Alberta. Beyond having expansive technical expertise, IST fosters a supportive environment where our staff values include compassion, connection, collaboration, creativity and courage. If you are passionate about leveraging technology to empower education, research and to drive institutional excellence, join us and be part of shaping the future of the University of Alberta through innovative IT solutions.

Position 

Reporting to the Director Digital Research Services, you will lead the technical operation of the Pan-Canadian AI Compute Environment - West (PAICE-W), a digital research platform facilitating AI and Machine Learning (ML) research. This PAICE-W will comprise GPU-rich cluster computing and fast storage to fulfill requirements for these research fields.

You will work with other University of Alberta Research Computing colleagues, other UAlberta staff in Information Services & Technology (IST), Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (amii) staff, Digital Research Alliance of Canada (Alliance) staff, and the staff of other research computing sites to ensure a secure, robust research environment for AI/ML researchers. In this role you will also implement security standards policies and procedures on the PAICE-W environment with University staff, Alliance staff, and staff of other research computing sites.

Duties 

As part of this opportunity, you will:

• Maintain operations of high-performance digital research equipment to ensure security, effective capability for research, and efficient operation.
• Automation of standard procedures to minimize human configuration errors will be expected.
• Documentation of configurations of the cluster and storage, as well as security overall will be critical aspects.
• Monitor and report on system use and security through logs and configuration controls. Troubleshoot aberrations and conduct root cause analyses.
• Train researchers on how to use this environment and on best practices to ensure they use the system effectively and efficiently.
• Collaborate with other trainers in the development and delivery of this training.
• Maintain necessary vendor relationships to ensure appropriate vendor support of warrantied computational and storage equipment. 

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree, preferably in a science, engineering, or biomedical area.
• Three years’ experience in maintaining and using high-performance computing (HPC) systems and research software commonly installed on such systems is required.
• Knowledge of how to use, install, and maintain HPC schedulers such as Slurm.
• Knowledge of programming languages and scripting languages.
• Experience with Linux/Unix systems.  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AI/ML is valuable.
• Computer and network security knowledge is expected, although experience may be gained on the job with guidance from security experts in IST and the Alliance.