Research User Computing Lead

About the Role

Responsibilities

• Set architecture and technical direction for the Linux scientific workstation fleet, including configuration management, provisioning, inventory, patching, access control, security, and lifecycle management.
• Establish infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, automation, and engineering standards for the Linux platform team.
• Lead build-versus-buy and tooling decisions for provisioning, configuration management, secrets management, observability, and fleet operations.
• Own physical and remote scientific workstation platforms and ensure secure, high-performance access.
• Oversee bare-metal and virtual provisioning, patch orchestration, inventory, drift detection, observability, reliability, and service continuity.
• Own security and compliance through host hardening, secrets management, audit logging, compliance baselines, NIST 800-171, and CIS Benchmarks.
• Define hardware standards, refresh cycles, model validation, driver compatibility, firmware and BIOS automation, and lifecycle plans.
• Lead, mentor, supervise, and develop the Linux workstation platform team, including Windows and macOS engineers.
• Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex platform, provisioning, access-control, hardware, and endpoint issues.
• Work with users, vendors, and IT teams to translate research and teaching needs into sustainable platform capabilities.
• Partner with network, security, IAM, storage, and advanced computing teams on integrated platform services.
• Provide recommendations to senior IT leadership on platform direction, risks, lifecycle planning, investment needs, and service improvements.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, or a related field is essential.
• A master’s degree in a relevant technical or management discipline is preferred.
• Preferred certifications include RHCE, LPIC, Puppet Certified Professional, or equivalent configuration-management certification.
• Preferred additional certifications include relevant networking, security, NAC/802.1X, ITIL, CISSP, CISM, or CompTIA Security+ credentials.

Required Skills

• Extensive experience in Linux systems, infrastructure, endpoint engineering, or platform engineering, with systems ownership at scale.
• Production experience with declarative configuration management, preferably Puppet or Ansible, and an infrastructure-as-code and GitOps mindset.
• Experience managing large Linux endpoint or workstation fleets, ideally including Ubuntu and Rocky Linux in enterprise, research, academic, or scientific environments.
• Experience with network provisioning, patch management, endpoint security, observability, hardware lifecycle management, firmware or BIOS automation, and compliance baselines.
• Working knowledge of network access control, including 802.1X, RADIUS, certificate-based authentication, endpoint supplicant configuration, and break-glass scenarios.
• Technical leadership experience involving architecture, tradeoffs, mentoring, engineering practices, hiring, or team development.
• Experience working with faculty, researchers, students, technical teams, vendors, and leadership to gather requirements and balance competing priorities.
• Experience supporting high-performance or GPU-enabled scientific computing environments, including NVIDIA/CUDA, performance tuning, and workload-specific desktop requirements.