HPC Operations Lead

HPC Data Center Standards, Processes & Preventative Maintenance - Develop, document, and enforce operational standards and procedures for Jump's HPC data centers covering power, cooling, cabling, and hardware lifecycle. - Design and own the preventative maintenance program, including scheduled inspections, component replacements, and firmware/capacity reviews to minimize unplanned downtime. - Drive continuous improvement of operational processes and pursue automation—including AI-driven approaches—to reduce manual effort and human error.

Critical Facility Systems Expertise - Serve as the subject matter authority on HPC data center power distribution, power striping strategies, and failover/redundancy configurations. - Own expertise across air cooling, liquid cooling (direct-to-chip, rear-door, CDU-based), and hybrid cooling architectures. - Maintain deep knowledge of environmental monitoring and controls (temperature, humidity, airflow, leak detection) and ensure systems remain within design parameters.

Monitoring & Incident Response - Own the HPC data center monitoring strategy end-to-end: define what is monitored, set alerting thresholds, and ensure comprehensive visibility into facility and hardware health. - Leverage AI tools to analyze telemetry data, identify failure patterns, predict potential issues, and accelerate root cause analysis during incidents. - Lead critical incident response and drive root cause analysis and corrective actions to prevent recurrence. - Establish and track operational KPIs including availability, mean time to repair, and efficiency metrics.

Server & Switch Hardware Expertise - Maintain deep, hands-on knowledge of server hardware architectures including multi-socket platforms, GPU/accelerator configurations, memory subsystems, NVMe/storage controllers, BMC/IPMI management, and firmware lifecycle. - Maintain deep, hands-on knowledge of network switch hardware including line cards, optics/transceivers, switch fabrics, and platform-specific diagnostics for Arista and Cisco platforms. - Evaluate new hardware platforms, drive hardware qualification and acceptance testing, and provide informed recommendations on hardware selection.

Hardware Break-Fix - Own the overall hardware break-fix function across all HPC sites, ensuring rapid diagnosis and resolution for servers, GPUs, network equipment, storage, and facility infrastructure. - Diagnose complex hardware failures at the component level—CPUs, DIMMs, GPUs, NICs, PSUs, fans, drives, switch line cards, and optics—and direct the team to resolve efficiently. - Establish escalation paths, SLA targets, and reporting for hardware failures.

Inventory & Spares Management - Own inventory processes and spares tracking across all HPC facilities, ensuring critical spares are stocked, tracked, and replenished to meet availability targets. - Maintain accurate asset records for all serialized and consumable inventory.

Planning, Vendor & Budget Management - Conduct capacity planning for space, power, cooling, and cabling to stay ahead of growth. - Gather requirements and plan new hardware installations including physical placement, power/cooling needs, and cabling. - Manage relationships with colocation providers and hardware vendors; negotiate contracts and SLAs. - Develop and manage operational budgets for equipment, staffing, and facilities.

Networking & Linux - Possess strong working knowledge of networking concepts including L2/L3 protocols, VLANs, BGP, OSPF, LACP, ECMP, and high-performance fabrics relevant to HPC environments. - Understand network architectures such as spine-leaf, fat-tree, and high-radix topologies used in HPC clusters. - Maintain strong Linux systems knowledge—comfortable navigating and troubleshooting at the OS level, including storage, networking, process management, log analysis, and system diagnostics.

AI-Driven Operations - Use AI tools daily across all aspects of the role: writing and reviewing documentation, analyzing operational data, drafting procedures, managing communications, and problem-solving. - Champion AI adoption within the team—set the expectation that every team member integrates AI into their daily workflows. - Identify and implement opportunities where AI can replace or augment manual operational processes.

Cross-Team Partnership - Partner with HPC Engineering, Network Engineering, and other teams to align operations with research and business needs. - Ensure compliance with all safety, security, and regulatory requirements.

Travel - Travel regularly to Jump's HPC data center sites for operational oversight, project execution, and team engagement.

This is a core requirement of the role.

Additional duties as assigned or needed.