Graduate Systems Engineer - IT Services - 95733 - Grade 6

Position Details

IT Services

Location: University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham UK

Full time starting salary is normally in the range £32,296 to £34,866 with potential progression once in post to £39,105

Grade: 6

Full Time, Permanent

Closing date: 5th January 2025

Our offer to you

People are at the heart of what we are and do.

The University of Birmingham is proud to have been a part of the City of Birmingham and the wider region for over 100 years, and we are equally proud to be recognised as a leading global university. We want to attract talented people from across the city and beyond, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success.

We are committed to helping the people who work here to develop through our sector-leading Birmingham Professional programme which provides all professional services staff with development opportunities and the encouragement to reach their full potential. With almost 5,000 professional services jobs in a wide-range of functions in Edgbaston and in our campus in Dubai, there are plenty of opportunities for you to be able to develop your career at the University.

We believe there is no such thing as a typical member of staff and that diversity is a source of strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation, and debate. We warmly welcome people from all backgrounds and are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where diversity is at the heart of who and what we are, and how we work.

Supporting our people to achieve a healthy work/life balance is important both to our employees and to the success of the University and, depending on the role, we offer a variety of flexible working arrangements. We therefore welcome discussions on all forms of flexible working. In addition, you will receive a generous package of benefits including 40 days paid holiday a year, one paid day a year for volunteering, occupational sick pay, and a pension scheme. We also have three high quality subsidised day nurseries.

The University is situated in leafy Edgbaston and there are excellent transport links to our beautiful campus, including main bus routes and a train station on site. On campus we have a state-of-the-art sports centre with pool, shops, places to eat and drink, our own art gallery, museum and botanical gardens.

Find out more about the benefits of working for the University of Birmingham

Background

The Advanced Research Computing team is looking for a new or recent graduate to grow into a Research Infrastructure Engineer to help design, build and support the tools used by some of the world's leading researchers in fields as diverse as cancer research, new battery technologies and climate science; the kind of things that will make the world a better place.

Advanced Research Computing (ARC) is an award-winning team based in IT Services which has earned a national and international profile for delivering high quality, underpinning research computing services. 

The Architecture, Infrastructure and Systems (AIS) group works in partnership with ARC’s Research Software Group and Research Engagement and Data Group to provide a sector leading environment for computationally and data intensive research, catering for all academic disciplines. The Group’s responsibilities include the design and management of local and national High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities, private cloud, multi-petabyte storage infrastructure as well as high-bandwidth (200Gb/s) low-latency networks. AIS also has a shared responsibility for the management of a purpose-built water-cooled data centre, designed to house HPC and AI infrastructure.

The nature of the users of BEAR services mean that ARC is a dynamic part of the organisation, working with some of the latest technology to give our researchers an advantage over their peers. Under the guidance of the AIS Group Leader, the Graduate Systems Engineer will build the skills to contribute to the delivery and support of these systems, working across a range of technologies.

The University of Birmingham has a record of sustained investment in HPC and research storage infrastructures and has just secured funding for the next 5 years. In recent years, ARC has expanded considerably. The Team has built a strong reputation on campus and in the Higher Education Sector for quality and innovation. 

ARC’s specialist systems and services are collectively known as BEAR (the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research). For further information see www.birmingham.ac.uk/BEAR 

Role Summary

The Graduate Systems Engineer is a member of ARC’s AIS group and will be developed to be responsible for:

•  Maintenance and support of BEAR infrastructure.
•  Contributing to the security and efficient operation of all elements of the infrastructure.
•  Supporting users and responding to user issues and requests.
•  Supporting outreach activity to enable exploitation of BEAR by a broader, and potentially non-traditional, user-base.

Main Duties

• Take day to day responsibility for the operation and support of designated elements of the BEAR infrastructure; In the area of storage this could include backup and import/export mechanisms. In HPC this could include management of the scheduling system. The post holder supports the management of multiple Petabytes of storage, increasingly containing all the University’s current research data assets and the archive from completed projects, as well as thousands of compute cores used for advanced modelling, data processing, machine learning and AI.
  • Ensure backup and archive systems are functioning correctly and regularly validate their ability to recall data.
  • Ensure HPC, Cloud systems are functioning correctly.
  • Monitor performance and respond to unexpected events.
  • Provide support on storage, HPC and related queries from system users in support of the Research Software Group.
  • Respond to user tickets and resolve issues.
• Undertake day-to-day sysadmin tasks, for example system updates, hardware faults and configuration management under the direction of the team lead.
• Undertake operational support of BEAR services, for example BlueBEAR, gitlab and data transfer tools (Globus).
• Undertake operational support of the underpinning systems that support the BEAR infrastructure, for example databases, network and configuration management.
• Under the guidance of other team members, support the upgrade and development of components of the BEAR systems.
• Under the guidance of the team lead, develop new services and supporting infrastructure that will form part of the BEAR system.
• Actively build relationships with the research community and participate in outreach activity to support research data management initiatives, collaborative research programmes, the uptake of BEAR services and embed good practice around HPC and data processing and storage.
• Working with external suppliers, ensure that hardware faults are resolved promptly.
• Support the implementation of technical strategies and solutions to maximize the efficiency of operations, reducing the carbon footprint of facilities and the associated energy costs.
• Originating, sourcing, and maintaining appropriate documentation to support services.
• Participate in the triaging rota for BEAR support tickets to facilitate appropriate and efficient responses to meet service levels.
• Promotes equality and values diversity acting as a role model and fostering an inclusive working culture.
• Undertake other such duties as may be required from time to time in furtherance of the work of IT Services.

Person Specification

• Formal education to degree level in a computer science related subject or equivalent experience.
• Experience working with Linux (Linux system administration would be an advantage).
• Proficiency in scripting skills is essential (such as BASH, Python, Perl).
• Experience of using source code version control such as git is essential.
• Ability to build and maintain relationships in a professional or similar environment.
• Ability to work as part of a team to achieve goals or deliver services.
• Ability to solve complex problems.
• A self-motivated learner in the computing domain.
• Good communication skills.
• Good broad knowledge of C&IT, including latest technology industry trends.
• Knowledge of the protected characteristics of the Equality Act 2010, and how to actively ensure in day-to-day activity in own area that those with protected characteristics are treated equally and fairly.

Desirable experience:

• Experience with configuration management tool is highly desirable (such as Salt, Puppet, Chef or Ansible).
• An awareness of storage technologies such as SAN, NAS, direct attached, SAS is desirable.
• An understanding of networking design and operation (TCP/IP, Infiniband).
• Some experience of cloud and container technologies (e.g., OpenStack, Docker, Singularity).
• Some experience of HPC job scheduling tools (such as SLURM) would be an advantage.

Informal enquiries to Jon Wakelin, email: j.wakelin@bham.ac.uk 

View our staff values and behaviours here 

We believe there is no such thing as a 'typical' member of University of Birmingham staff and that diversity in its many forms is a strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation and debate at the heart of University life. We are committed to proactively addressing the barriers experienced by some groups in our community and are proud to hold Athena SWAN, Race Equality Charter and Disability Confident accreditations. We have an Equality Diversity and Inclusion Centre that focuses on continuously improving the University as a fair and inclusive place to work where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. We are also committed to sustainability, which is a key part of our strategy. You can find out more about our work to create a fairer university for everyone on our website.