Research Computing Facilitator at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, CA

Job description

Position Title: Research Computing Facilitator Position Type: Regular Hiring Range: $115,200 - $129,600 per year; commensurate with experience Pay Frequency: Annual Company Overview: Santa Clara University is a prestigious academic institution dedicated to advancing research, innovation, and education. As such, we are expanding our high-performance computing environment as part of a major donor-funded investment in GPU and AI research. We are seeking a Research Computing Facilitator to join our dynamic team and be the bridge between the HPC infrastructure and the faculty, researchers, and students who use it. Job Description: As the strategic anchor for the SCU High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment, the Research Computing Facilitator serves as the primary technical partner between Santa Clara University’s research community and its computational infrastructure. This role focuses on the "outer relationship" by understanding what faculty, researchers, and students are trying to accomplish, translating that into requests that the technical infrastructure team can act on and building the training, documentation, and support that help researchers become self-sufficient on the cluster.The Research Computing Facilitator provides leadership, engineers robust processes, and supports long-term planning to ensure the HPC ecosystem evolves alongside the university's research mission. The ideal candidate is highly curious, creative, tenacious, and works with minimal supervision. This is a strong fit for someone who enjoys working directly with researchers, has an advanced technical toolkit, and wants to grow in research computing. A research background (e.g., graduate study, lab work) is valuable along with the ability to work collaboratively in a higher education environment. Work Schedule: This position requires on-site support on a regular basis. On-campus vs. remote schedules will operate on a hybrid model based on strategic and operational tasks. Essential Duties and Responsibilities 1. Research Consultation and Support Serve as the primary point of contact for faculty, researchers, and students seeking to use HPC and research computing resources. Own the full-cycle consultation process with researchers and faculty, translating cutting-edge academic requirements into scalable, robust technical solutions. Evaluate, recommend, and drive the adoption of emerging technologies and external integrations with national academic computing resources to expand institutional research capabilities. Provide high-level technical leadership and programming support to resolve complex, multi-disciplinary computational challenges across university departments. 2. Process Innovation, Governance, and Training Design and deliver standard operating procedures (SOPs) and automated workflows for user onboarding, resource allocation, and system governance. Collaborate with the technical infrastructure team to establish system performance metrics and reporting frameworks to showcase HPC utilization and research impacts to executive leadership. Design and spearhead comprehensive training programs, advanced workshops, and modern digital documentation to cultivate a self-sustaining research culture. Lead training on modern research computing practices, including code management, AI-assisted coding, CI/CD, and version control (e.g., Git/GitHub). 3. Community and Program Building Gather researcher feedback and usage patterns and share them with the technical infrastructure team to inform capacity planning and tooling decisions. Track engagement and training metrics and report on research computing adoption and impact to leadership. Inform the deployment lifecycle , configuration, and optimization of specialized scientific software, compilers, containerized environments, and shared libraries. Support the architecture, fine-tuning, and policy creation for workload managers and cluster schedulers (e.g., Slurm) to ensure optimal, equitable resource distribution.