HPC Administrator

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Do you want to contribute to the daily management and improvement of the Dutch National Supercomputer Snellius? Are you a system administrator that wants to provide top tier High Performance Computing (HPC) services, develop (secure) computing services, and manage a reliable and secure facility. Then we have the perfect challenge for you!

Where you will work

SURF is the ICT cooperative for Dutch educational and research institutions. Together with them, we work on digital services and complex innovation challenges to enhance the quality of education and research. As an HPC administrator, you will contribute significantly to this by ensuring that researchers have access to top tier HPC facilities.

The team you will join

You will be joining the HPC Services team. This team is responsible for hosting, maintaining, and supporting users on the National Supercomputer Snellius. You will collaborate with the other system administrators and advisors in the HPC Services team but also work closely with the other HPC team at SURF – the HPC Development team.

Together the HPC Services and HPC Development are responsible for various computing services and the associated user and application support, including supporting the National Supercomputer Snellius, the LUMI pre-exascale Supercomputer, HPCV Services and SURF’s Experimental Technologies Platform. The teams focus, among other things, on providing users of the SURF (and international) infrastructures with permanent access to the most appropriate hardware and software solutions. We assist users in efficiently using new technologies and methods, enabling them to make effective use of the available infrastructure. In this way, we contribute to our mission of facilitating top-level Dutch research.

What you will do

Picture it for a moment: in this position, you will work with Snellius, the Dutch National Supercomputer. You'll be right on top of Snellius' advanced computing infrastructure, with an impressive 240,000 cores, 640 GPUs and a staggering peak performance of around 30 Pflops/s. As our new HPC administrator, it will be up to you to manage and continuously improve Snellius and the OSSC (ODISSEI secure supercomputer) environment to the best of your ability.

Other tasks you will handle

  • Maintain and improve batch system based on SLURM
  • Maintain and improve configuration management of the system based on Confluent and SALTSTACK
  • Maintain and improve parallel filesystems, currently based on GPFS
  • Maintain and improve monitoring, logging and reporting systems
  • 3rd line helpdesk support Snellius

Your skills and experience

You are curious about new techniques and advanced HPC environments. You are analytically strong, look ahead, and have a proactive attitude. You have good communication skills and your experience with various (cluster) environments, scripting languages and technologies complete the picture.

In addition, you have:

  • A bachelor's or university degree or equivalant working experience in IT technology;
  • Demonstrable experience in managing Linux (cluster) environments;
  • Proficiency in scripting languages (Bash and Python), proficiency in programming languages C, C++ and Rust is a pre ;
  • Knowledge of virtualisation, containers;
  • Knowledge of security aspects in respect to Operating systems and software/network layers;
  • Knowledge of networking. Experience with Ethernet and Infiniband protocols;
  • Knowledge of technologies such as batch scheduling (Slurm, Loadleveler, PBS, etc), (Software) Storage solutions (IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS), CXFS, BeeGFS, etc) monitoring software, (Grafana, Prometheus), database software (MariaDB, Postgres), configuration management software (SaltStack, Ansible, CFEngine, Puppet) and version control software.

Prior to starting this job, a VOG must be presented.

SURF takes pleasure in doing its recruitment itself; acquisition is therefore not appreciated.

Applying for a job at SURF

This is what you can expect

1

Apply

After submitting your application, you will immediately receive a confirmation e-mail.

2

Response

After the the closing date, you will receive a response from our recruitment team.

3

First interview

We invite you to our office, because we want to get to know you.

4

Second interview

We invite you again for an interview with others who also want to get to know you.

5

Assessment

We may ask you to do an assignment (assessment).

6

Are you the right person?

Then you will receive a salary offer from one of our HR advisors.

7

Welcome to SURF!

You join onboarding activities with other new colleagues.

Location
Science Park, 140, 1098 XG, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Employment
Fixed term with permanent employment intention
Salary
€4791 - €7786
Hours per week
32 to 40 hours
Deadline
22 March 2026
Substantive questions
Jorik van Kemenade
jorik.vankemenade@surf.nl
+31618946453
Questions about procedure
SURF Recruitment
recruitment@surf.nl
+31 642564500

What we offer

  • Extensive training opportunities
  • 8.33 % holiday pay
  • 8.33 % end-of-year bonus
  • 36 holidays per year (based on a 40-hour working week)
  • An excellent pension scheme
  • An NS Business Card 1st class
  • Chair massages
  • Home working allowance

One more thing...

Research shows: many people do not apply for a job until they can tick all the boxes. We think talent, commitment and fresh insights are just as important. So do you find this job opening interesting? Don't hold back and apply!

Apply for "HPC Beheerder"