Senior HPC DevOps Engineer

Description

The company's R&D IT group runs a design infrastructure of more than 10,000 servers across 7 multi-cloud data centers worldwide.

This is a Senior Linux DevOps role on the HPC team, focused on automation, tooling and software development for large HPC and VDI environments.

You will work with colleagues around the world to deliver HPC and virtual desktop services to design engineers, spending much of your time building automation that cuts manual work, improves reliability and speeds up delivery.

Work is split 50% development and 50% operations. The European team owns all designated services in its region and provides backup to the India and US regions. You can contribute from problem analysis and design through implementation, testing and ongoing improvement.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain automation that configures, deploys and manages the lifecycle of Linux systems and HPC services at scale.
• Build and run CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code and automated tests so platform changes ship continuously.
• Write and maintain system configurations, base images and deployment approaches using Ansible, Terraform or similar tools.
• Create reusable libraries, scripts and tools that reduce manual operations work and raise reliability.
• Manage configuration, deployment and upkeep of Linux systems and services, keeping performance, reliability and security high through proactive monitoring and tuning.
• Set and enforce policies and standards for Linux administration, security and compliance, and define best practices for configuration, access and base images.
• Join the on-call rotation that provides 24/7 support to end users.
• Work with global teams to deliver HPC and VDI solutions for critical R&D work.
• Take part in Agile activities including PI planning, sprint planning, backlog refinement, stand-ups, retrospectives and releases.
• Advise users and stakeholders and keep improving delivered solutions.
• Investigate and fix system and deployment problems through root-cause analysis.
• Make sure solutions meet standards for security, performance, scalability, availability and maintainability.
• Drive continuous improvement through new ideas, automation and DevOps practice.
• Keep thorough documentation of configurations, automation workflows, policies and procedures.
• Join solution architecture, technical reviews and technology evaluations that keep work aligned with company goals.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or software engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Approximately 5-7 years in DevOps, automation engineering or platform engineering.
• Strong scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, Perl or similar languages.
• Hands-on work with configuration management and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Ansible, Terraform or Puppet.
• Solid experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with GitLab CI, Jenkins or similar tools.
• Skilled in Linux system administration, ideally on RedHat or a similar distribution.
• Extensive AWS experience, preferably with certifications, and familiarity with cloud-native automation and IaC.
• Solid DevOps mindset, able to assess and improve processes using Lean or Agile methods.
• Strong command of Unix/Linux command-line tools, shell scripting and automation best practices.
• Experience connecting automation to APIs, databases and enterprise platforms.
• Strong problem-solving and analysis skills to resolve complex issues at OS and application level.
• Experience with stakeholder engagement, requirements gathering, solution design and cross-functional collaboration.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.
• Preferred: experience building automation frameworks or internal tooling such as self-service portals, workflow engines or monitoring integrations.
• Preferred: knowledge of container technologies (Docker, Podman) and orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, OpenShift) for automation workloads.
• Preferred: hands-on knowledge of grid computing with LSF or Slurm, and of Linux desktop environments.
• Preferred: familiarity with semiconductor design and verification tools and workflows.
• Preferred: knowledge of networking concepts, including bridging, synchronization, queuing and communication protocols.
• Preferred: familiarity with AI-assisted development, code review tools or LLM-based automation, which is an advantage.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers.
• Ability to manage several priorities and adapt quickly to new technologies.
• Clear written and verbal communication.
• Results-oriented mindset.
• Ability to influence non-technical audiences with data insights.
• Self-driven, with a strong sense of ownership and the ability to work independently in a busy environment.

Conditions

Location: the Netherlands.

Hours include a rotating on-call duty providing 24/7 end-user support.