SYSADMIN ENGINEER (HPC)

Svitla Systems Inc. is looking for a System Administrator for a full-time position (40 hours per week) in Canada. Our client is a global, science-led biopharmaceutical company specializing in discovering, developing, and commercializing prescription medicines. The company operates in several therapeutic areas, including oncology, cardiovascular, renal, metabolic, respiratory, immunology, and rare diseases. They work alongside the world’s leading academic and biotech research institutions to stimulate innovation and evaluate emerging technologies. The client operates in over 100 countries, and its innovative medicines are used by millions of patients worldwide. The headquarters is located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. This location aligns with the focus on science and innovation, providing proximity to leading academic and research institutions.

The team is an R&D IT group developing and operating the Scientific Computing Platform (SCP), a collection of scientific applications centered on a high-performance computing (HPC) environment. The platform serves scientists across R&D with use cases ranging from structural chemistry to pharmacology, imaging, multi-OMICs, structural biology, and many more. The team comprises 50-60 individuals across three core technical teams (HPC infrastructure, software infrastructure, and applications), a business engagement team, an operations team, and a small program management team. You will join the team responsible for maintaining an HPC platform the Clinical Pharmacology organization uses to perform complex Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics calculations in determining a drug’s efficacy and safety during clinical trials. You will be a member of an agile DevOps team, working together to build and maintain platform services and end-to-end solutions supporting leading scientists’ computational needs. The successful candidate will bring deep knowledge in one or more technologies relating to HPC and contribute to specific projects in those areas of expertise while also having the opportunity to gain broad knowledge across other technology areas.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in a quantitative or engineering field (computer science, bioinformatics, engineering) OR equivalent work experience.
• At least 4 years of hands-on experience operating and/or engineering large-scale computing environments such as HPC (e.g., pharmaceutical industry, biotech are preferable).
• In-depth knowledge of Linux System Administration, specifically with Red Hat Linux.
• Understanding Linux system administration, the TCP/IP stack, and storage subsystems.
• Understanding of operation and configuration of public cloud computing infrastructure (preferably AWS) CloudFormation, Compute, Storage, Networking, and IAM.
• Experience in scripting using Bash and Python.
• Knowledge of container technology and schedulers (e.g., Docker and Singularity, Nomad, and Kubernetes).
• Experience with CI/CD GitHub/GitLab actions.
• Experience with observability stacks such as Grafana, Prometheus, and ELK.
  
  

Responsibilities

• Deploy new applications and services to the private or public cloud using IaC, configuration management, and CI/CD.
• Provide operational support for the platform and deployed services, including direct end-user engagement.
• Drive problem investigation and resolution for complex incidents.
• Maintain scientific workflows built on the platform with open-source software or vendor partnerships.
• Manage the infrastructure aspects of the configuration, implementation, and support of the platform and GitHub workspace in the cloud.
• Supervise monitoring and responses to service alerts and events on time.
• Implement best practices to optimize efficiency and reliability.
• Maintain documentation and providing technical guidance and support to team members.
  
  

Nice to have

• Familiarity with application profiling and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Salt, Puppet).
• Experience in using analytical tools: NONMEM, R, RStudio, Monolix, etc.
• Experience in managing HPC schedulers such as Slurm.
• Familiarity with Conda package management.
  
  

We offer