Senior System Administrators at Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)

About The Job

• The CSIR has vacancies for Senior Systems Administrators in the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) area, within the National Integration Cyber infrastructure System (NICIS), which is hosted by Next Generation Enterprises and Institution cluster. The incumbents will be responsible to setup and provide an ongoing support of High Performance Computing (HPC) and OpenStack cloud infrastructure. The positions are based in Cape Town.

Key Responsibilities

• Provision and de-provision HPC and cloud accounts;
• Deploy, manage, and operate HPC and cloud environments;
• Contribute and identify appropriate use and operational best practices;
• Keep technical documentation up to date;
• Proactively keep up to date on cloud services and developments;
• Create (where appropriate) automation, in order to streamline provisioning and de-provisioning processes;
• Lead certain data/service migration projects;
• Monitor and provision of high-performance server/systems; and
• Back-up servers and associated operating systems and software.

Qualifications, Skills And Experience

• A National Diploma or Bachelor’s degree in information technology or related field (e.g. computer systems engineering, computer science) with at least six years’ experience as a LINUX system administrator, of which two years’ should be in HPC or cloud;
• Industry certification in any related ICT field would be advantageous;
• Experience provisioning, operating, and maintaining HPC systems and Cloud Infrastructure;
• Knowledge of programming (e.g. C, C++ and Fortran);
• Extensive experience in bash, python scripting and more;
• Experience in creating Cron jobs and automation scripts;
• Experience and understanding of RAID configuration;
• Experience and understanding of Parallel Filesystems;
• Experience with job schedulers such as Torque, PBSPro and SLURM;
• Experience with configuration and management software such GIT;
• Capabilities to provide guidance and best practices for HPC system, Cloud operations and deployment throughout the lifecycle of a project;
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills;
• Deployment experience using common OpenStack technologies like Ansible, Helm, Puppet, Docker, and more;
• Ability to work in a collaborative environment;
• Detail-oriented, strong work ethic and high standard of excellence;
• Fast learner, Achiever , sets high personal goals;
• Must be able to work on multiple projects and consistently meet project deadlines.

Closing date: 10 December 2020