Systems Engineering / Storage Engineer

The main goal of this position is to implement and operate HPC storage services in a multi-tenant infrastructure. As a Storage Engineer you will directly contribute to the designing, implementation, maintenance, and documentation of storage services for HPC.

Your contributions will directly impact the development and enhancement of HPC systems, thereby enhancing overall system functionality and efficiency.

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) develops and operates cutting-edge, High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems as an essential service facility for science. The centre enables world-class research through its scientific user lab, which is available to domestic and international researchers in academia, industry, and the business sector. The centre is operated by ETH Zurich and has offices in Lugano (headquarter) and Zurich.

With the convergence of HPC and cloud technology, supercomputing service providers like CSCS strive to improve our service portfolios that focus on large, complex, and diverse scientific and engineering applications. Effectively providing performant and capable storage systems supporting the needs of HPC platforms running on a multi-tenant infrastructure is complex and challenging engineering work.

This position is funded by a project that will enable scientists to benefit from large scale climate and earth observation data, and will involve collaboration with partners such as the ETHZ Geolab and C2SM, as well as international partners such as ECMWF, NASA and NOAA.

In an organization that values autonomy, ownership and continuous learning, the successful candidate will have the opportunity to gain specialized hands-on experience through activities characterized by the challenging aspects typical of the HPC field.

• Sound knowledge of Linux administration skills.

• Sound knowledge of generic filesystem aspects and functions (data, metadata, block-size etc.).

• Sound knowledge of storage redundancy technologies (RAID, D-RAID, EC etc.).

• Sound knowledge of backup solutions (DMF, TSM, Veeam) and backup concepts.

• Sound knowledge of Object Storage concepts and S3 service usage/implementation.

• Sound knowledge of automation tools and framework, including CI/CD processes and ecosystem (e.g., Gitlab CI, HashiCorp Vault).

• Experience with parallel file systems (GPFS, Lustre) is preferred.

• Experience with Ceph Storage Clusters is preferred.

• Experience with versioning systems and CI/CD workflows such as ArgoCD is preferred.

• Experience with physical servers automated installation systems such as OpenCHAMI, MAAS, or Foreman is preferred.

• Experience with developing Ansible configurations is preferred.

• Experience developing services on top of Kubernetes is preferred.

• A bachelor’s or higher degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience.