| Job Description Summary: | GW Information Technology (GW IT) provides empowering tools and caring support for all members of The George Washington University (GW) community. We are focused on driving digital transformation and innovation to enable the academic and operational excellence of our students, faculty, staff, and researchers. At GW IT, we are committed to cultivating a team culture that values diversity, inclusion, respect, and collaboration, and invests in each of our team members to grow in their technology and career skills.
Research Technology Services (RTS) is a team of Research Computing and Data (RCD) professionals within GW IT that provide and support various cyberinfrastructure (CI) systems and services in support of GW’s research mission. The RTS service portfolio includes high-performance computing clusters; public cloud infrastructure, purpose-built computational, data management, storage platforms, application and workflow support across a wide array of research disciplines. All RTS members have a blend of “system facing” and “researcher facing” duties, with diverse responsibilities across Applications, System Administration, User Support, High-performance Computing, Research Data Management, Networking, Cloud Computing, and Cybersecurity.
The Cyberinfrastructure Specialist I is an entry-level RCD position, with responsibility in system engineering and researcher support. As an entry-level position, the Cyberinfrastructure Specialist I will develop a broad set of skills and responsibilities across RTS services. This position plays a crucial role in supporting researchers and supports senior engineers in troubleshooting, architecting, and optimizing research cyberinfrastructure.
Collaboration across the Cyberinfrastructure Team is central to this role, involving active participation in supporting new initiatives, assisting with design of solutions, and managing existing applications. Responsibilities encompass providing system administration support, user training, ensuring High-Performance Computing (HPC) service delivery, and enforcing security compliance standards to uphold a secure and efficient cyber infrastructure. This position is expected to contribute to solution design and implementation.
This position involves managing applications, system administration support, providing user support and training, ensuring HPC service delivery, and implementing security compliance standards to maintain a secure and efficient cyber infrastructure.
High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Big Data
- Monitor and optimize throughput of HPC jobs that include complex computational tasks and big data processing.
- Engage with researchers to enhance the efficiency and performance of HPC applications and workflows, including the gathering benchmark metrics.
- Participate in outreach events and workshops to educate and update users about HPC developments, tools, and resources.
- Support team members in ongoing HPC enhancements, maintenance and upgrades.
- Working with others on complex R&D projects involving teams of scientific researchers, hackers, and developers.
Cloud Computing - Address user questions and concerns, including troubleshooting cloud-related issues.
- Provide first-response to user issues and escalate when necessary, providing incident report documentation.
- Monitor cloud infrastructure and services, respond to alerts, and take appropriate actions to maintain system performance and availability.
- Create and update knowledge base articles, FAQs, and support documentation.
Networking - Troubleshooting of network connectivity, routing, and switching issues.
- Assist with managing and maintaining the physical cabling infrastructure.
- Assist with the configuration and setup of routers and switches.
- Work alongside network engineers to implement changes and updates to network and switch configuration.
- Maintain accurate network documentation and produce reports on network performance.
User Support and Technical Consulting
- Engage with users via a ticketing system.
- Be proactive in providing support to users and groups, reach out to existing users and ensure the user experience on the Cyberinfrastructure is not lacking.
- Provide support to users, addressing their technical questions and resolving or escalating system-related problems.
- Assist users with account management, access permissions, and user education on best practices.
Applications
- Collaborate with users to ensure applications run efficiently, meeting both performance requirements and user expectations.
- Provide training to users, as needed.
- Install and deploy applications as needed by users.
- Troubleshoot and resolve application-related issues.
- Support planning and execution of application upgrades and deployments.
Data Management Plans
- Develop and implement data management plans that comply with NIST/CMMC standards, ensuring proper data handling, storage, and retention.
- Educate researchers and stakeholders on data management best practices and policies.
- Audit current practices and deployments to ensure they are in compliance with the Industry Standards.
Storage Systems
- Manage storage devices to store and retrieve large volumes of data for various research computing applications and platforms.
- Optimize storage systems for performance, scalability, and disaster recovery.
Cybersecurity and Identity - Work with the security team to conduct regular security assessments and reviews of the cyberinfrastructure to identify vulnerabilities and risks.
- Recommend and implement security postures and protocols to mitigate potential threats and breaches.
- Manage and monitor infrastructure security.
- Work with GW Information Security team to support infosec related activities.
- Facilitate consistent identity and group management throughout research cyberinfrastructure with Enterprise Active Directory.
Performs other related duties as assigned. The omission of specific duties does not preclude the supervisor from assigning duties that are logically related to the position. |
| Preferred Qualifications: | RTS is a highly collaborative team, where team members support and challenge each other. Team members are expected to show initiative and a commitment to continuous professional development and life-long learning. The successful candidate will be able to articulate and defend their ideas in a spirit of collegiality and technical excellence and to both give and receive criticism constructively.
The successful candidate is expected to have a subset of the desired qualifications in varying degrees, suitable for the level of responsibility for this position and aligned with the Job Description Summary. - Bachelor’s degree, preferably in a scientific, mathematical, or technical field, though non-technical degrees with technical work experience will also be considered.
- Proficiency in managing applications, both off-the-shelf and custom, and troubleshooting related issues.
- Experience performing and supporting research in an academic environment.
- Knowledge of system administration principles, including system monitoring, hardening, and performance optimization and familiarity with containers and container management.
- Familiarity with HPC systems, parallel computing, and big data processing.
- Experience with penetration testing, intrusion detection, mitigation and prevention practices.
- Understanding of public cloud services and integrating these systems with on-premise infrastructure.
- Strong understanding of cybersecurity principles and practices.
- Experience providing user support with excellent customer service skills and ability to effectively document solutions.
- Effective problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills, and ability to balance effectively multiple concurrent tasks.
- Applications development background with analytical and troubleshooting skills.
- Experience with relational databases in a research environment and data modeling in support of research.
- Solid fundamentals of modern packet switch networks and current Internet technologies, including IPv6.
- Ability to work and communicate with others on complex projects while sometimes developing the workflows and processes needed to support research.
- Excellent oral and written communication skills; ability to prepare and present comprehensive presentations to IT and business executives.
- Passion for building systems, a willingness to learn, and the ability to program, along with strong, applied systems engineering skills.
This position can be based out of the Foggy Bottom, DC or Ashburn, VA campus locations. Travel between campus locations will be required.
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