AI Research Support Engineer

$70,000 - $90,000/Yr

University of Florida - Gainesville, FL

Part-time - Entry Level

Gainesville, FL

10,001+ employees

Educational Services

About the position

UF Information Technology (UFIT) is seeking an intermediate- to expert-level Artificial Intelligence Research Support Engineer to join Research Computing, a unit within UFIT. This position offers an excellent opportunity to work with dedicated employees focused on understanding and interpreting the technological needs of the University of Florida's innovative and inspirational community. The role involves advanced system administration tasks, including building and supporting workflows for advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and providing user support on complex, high-performance, and data-intensive computing resources operated by UF Research Computing. This support is crucial for advanced scientific, engineering, and scholarly research, as UF has been operating HiPerGator, the fastest supercomputer owned and operated by a university in the USA, for nearly a decade. The workloads on HiPerGator span a wide range of research disciplines, from physical science and engineering to medicine and drug discovery, and the demand for its computing power has dramatically increased with UF's AI Initiative. The successful candidate will be responsible for designing efficient workflows for researchers to utilize existing HiPerGator services and developing new features or services according to researchers' needs. This position requires collaboration with a diverse team to meet the varied needs of researchers, who often come with rich data sets and complex questions. The role involves understanding the problems researchers intend to solve, developing effective workflows, and implementing and validating these workflows in collaboration with researchers. Additionally, the position includes exploring, evaluating, and testing software and applications that interoperate with HiPerGator services, as well as creating training materials and conducting training for new features and services developed. This position is ideal for individuals looking for an exciting career in supporting research by world-class faculty and their students and collaborators in their quest to solve some of the world's pressing problems. The role offers ample opportunity for on-the-job training in new skills required for the diverse tasks involved in supporting advanced research.

Responsibilities

• Understand and explore the problem researchers intend to solve and develop effective workflows to run on HiPerGator towards a solution.
• Design new features to existing services and new services to support a researcher's workflows and participate in the implementation in collaboration with colleagues in Research Computing.
• Design, implement, test, and validate the proposed workflows with the researchers, which may involve scripting, programming, using the SLURM scheduler, and using software tools available on HiPerGator.
• Explore, evaluate, and test software, operating systems, and applications on workstations in labs that are used for research and often interoperate with HiPerGator services.
• Work with the training team, create training materials, and conduct training for the new features and services that are developed.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in an appropriate area and two years of relevant experience; or a high school diploma or equivalent and six years of experience for Level III.
• Bachelor's degree in an appropriate area and four years of relevant experience; or a high school diploma or equivalent and eight years of relevant experience for Level IV.
• Experience with a variant of Linux, ideally RedHat Enterprise Linux or CentOS Linux.
• Building complex workflows such as common in gene sequencing and machine learning.
• Parallel programming for shared memory (threads, OpenMP) and distributed memory (MPI, CUDA).
• Programming experience in scripting languages such as bash, Perl, Python and in compiled languages FORTRAN and C/C++.
• Experience with resource schedulers such as Kubernetes or Slurm.
• Familiarity with contemporary workflow management systems such as Nextflow or Snakemake.
• Knowledge of contemporary web application frameworks, deployment, and CI.

Nice-to-haves

• Bachelor's or Associate's degree in any scholarly domain: science, technology, engineering, arts, or mathematics (STEAM).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Outstanding interpersonal skills and the ability to work collegially and interact effectively with a diverse constituency.
• Excellent organizational skills and an ability to prioritize and complete simultaneous projects with minimal supervision.
• Accuracy, attention to detail, and a customer service-oriented approach and mindset.
• Ability to work collaboratively and build strategic relationships with both other IT staff on campus and with faculty and their collaborators.
• Critical and creative thinking skills.

Benefits

• Accrue vacation leave at a rate of 6.769 hours biweekly/22 days annually.
• Sick leave at 4 hours biweekly/13 days annually.
• Eligible for 10 paid holidays each year.
• Four personal leave days/32 hours per year for vacation-accruing TEAMS employees.
• Very competitive benefits package.