Infrastructure Platform Engineer

Department Research Computing Center About the Department The University of Chicago Research Computing Center (RCC), a unit within the Office of Research, provides advanced research computing resources and expertise to support computational and data-intensive research across the University. RCC enables research through centrally managed high-performance computing (HPC), storage, visualization, and AI infrastructure, along with scientific consulting, user support, education, and training. RCC also helps researchers leverage local, national, and cloud-based computational resources. The Office of Research oversees sponsored research administration, research development, and contract management across the University. Job Summary The job participates in the design of automated, scalable, and rapidly deployable solutions to systems infrastructure and server configuration. Installs, configures, and maintains operating systems, monitoring and alerting systems, utility software, and firewalls. Plans and executes hands-on maintenance for production servers as well as Windows and Linux servers. The University of Chicago is seeking a highly-qualified and versatile Infrastructure Platform Engineer to design, deploy, and operate the infrastructure and platform services that support the Research Computing Center's mission and its users. This is a hands-on role spanning infrastructure automation, private-cloud deployment, platform and service integration, and general Linux system administration. The engineer in this role will provision systems from bare metal upward, write Infrastructure as Code, integrate community and third-party services, interact with stakeholders in a high-level research environment, and mentor student workers on programming and infrastructure projects.  This is a hybrid position requiring at least 3 days per week working on site. Responsibilities Design, provision, and operate infrastructure from bare metal upward, including provisioning physical/virtual nodes, deploying and maintaining private cloud platforms (e.g., OpenStack) and virtualization environments (e.g., Proxmox VE), and writing Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Perform general Linux system administration: OS installation and security hardening, patching, package and repository management, storage, networking, backups, and monitoring. Automate the full lifecycle of systems and services using configuration management and CI/CD tooling, continually reduce manual operational toil. Perform data center activities related to infrastructure under responsibility of this role, such as cabling, installation of physical servers and server components, configuration of out-of-band networking infrastructure, configuration of managed Ethernet switches. Deploy, configure, and integrate community and third-party services (e.g., ColdFront, XDMod, Open OnDemand) with existing environments and identity/authentication systems. Stand up and maintain observability (metrics, logging, alerting), respond to incidents, and troubleshoot performance, reliability, and configuration issues across the stack. Contribute to and maintain internal documentation (procedures, configurations, runbooks, and architecture). Independently scope, investigate, and resolve emerging technical challenges. Evaluate design alternatives against cost, maintainability, and operational impact. Maintains complex system and network administration functions. Works with moderate guidance to administer simple systems and assists in the administration of larger systems. Ensures integrity by implementing appropriate routine software and hardware solutions. Conducts routine hardware and software audits of workstations, backing up all information. Performs other related work as needed. Minimum Qualifications Education: Minimum requirements include a college or university degree in related field. Work Experience: Minimum requirements include knowledge and skills developed through 2-5 years of work experience in a related job discipline. Certifications: --- Preferred Qualifications Education: Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. Experience: Experience deploying and operating a private cloud platform (e.g., OpenStack) from scratch. Experience with container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes). Experience with provisioning bare-metal infrastructure. Experience with CI/CD pipelines and practices. Experience with monitoring/observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK). Experience with identity/authentication integration (LDAP, SSO, Kerberos). Experience installing, configuring, and maintaining scientific or research software. Experience with virtualization (e.g., Proxmox VE, VMware). Experience mentoring junior staff or students. Technical Skills and Knowledge: Knowledge of Linux administration required, RHEL strongly preferred. Solid understanding of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, routing, firewalls, VPNs). Proficiency in one or more scripting languages (e.g., Python, Bash). Familiarity with community research computing tools (e.g., XDMod, ColdFront, Open OnDemand). Understanding of security best practices for system hardening and access control. Familiarity with data center work, including server installation and troubleshooting. Working knowledge of automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or Salt. Preferred Competencies Understand and translate researchers' scientific goals into computational requirements. Excellent written and verbal communication and interpersonal skills. Demonstrated ability to work effectively with technical and non-technical teams. Identify and gain expertise in appropriate new technologies and/or software tools. Function as part of an interactive team while demonstrating self-initiative to achieve project's goals and Research Computing Center's mission. Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities. Working Conditions