Senior Technical Lead of Research Infrastructure

Office of Information Technology at the University of Colorado Boulder encourages applications for a Senior Technical Lead of Research Infrastructure!

This role provides technical leadership and hands‑on expertise for research computing infrastructure, including HPC systems (Alpine), research storage (Peta Library, scratch), and Blanca clusters. The Lead serves as the senior technical expert and primary mentor for HPC Specialists and Storage System Administrators within the Research Infrastructure Technology (RIT) team. This position also translates architectural direction from the Associate Director into practical implementation, leads complex technical work, and develops team capabilities through direct mentorship and guidance.

CU is an Equal Opportunity Employer and complies with all applicable federal, state, and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment. We are committed to creating a workplace where all individuals are treated with respect and dignity, and we encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply, including protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.

The Senior Technical Lead translates architectural direction into hands‑on infrastructure solutions, serving as the team's primary technical escalation point when complex HPC and storage challenges arise. This role shapes day‑to‑day technical decision‑making for infrastructure operations and improvements, while establishing and maintaining the technical standards, procedures, and standard practices that guide the team's systems work. The position tackles sophisticated multi‑system issues that span infrastructure domains and champions automation, monitoring, and operational improvements that strengthen system reliability.

This position performs hands‑on administration of HPC clusters, storage systems (ZFS, RAID, GPFS, Lustre), and parallel computing infrastructure, leading complex system changes, upgrades, and optimizations. This role conducts hardware repairs, OS configuration (Linux/Unix), and software updates while optimizing system performance, resource utilization, and data‑transfer capabilities (Globus). The position manages compute resources and job schedulers (SLURM), automates infrastructure provisioning through configuration management tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef), and develops monitoring and observability platforms (Nagios, Grafana) to maintain system reliability.

The Senior Technical Lead mentors HPC and Storage System Administrators on technical skills and problem‑solving approaches, providing hands‑on guidance during complex implementations and troubleshooting. This role develops team capabilities through pairing, code reviews, and guided learning while building team confidence to handle infrastructure challenges independently. The position coaches team members on user documentation and knowledge‑sharing, supports cross‑training initiatives to reduce single points of failure, and champions a collaborative problem‑solving culture within the RIT team.

The Senior Technical Lead maintains technical runbooks, procedures, and troubleshooting guides while documenting system configurations and implementation details. This role creates and updates architectural diagrams for team reference, works with the team to build a knowledge base and wiki, and conducts technical knowledge‑sharing sessions for the RIT team.

The Senior Technical Lead coordinates with User Support (UST), Data Center Operations (DCOPS) and other teams on technical issues, participates in sprint planning and Agile processes, and provides technical input on infrastructure planning and vendor evaluations. This role supports the Associate Director with technical assessments and recommendations, and advises researchers on optimal infrastructure use when brought up. The position is expected to use open source and community projects to enhance infrastructure capabilities.

This position will…