HPC & Cloud Computing Engineer

ABOUT ASTRAZENECA

AstraZeneca is a global, innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business that focuses on the discovery, development, and commercialisation of prescription medicines for some of the world's most serious diseases. But we're more than one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies. At AstraZeneca, we're proud to have a unique workplace culture that inspires innovation and collaboration. Here, employees are empowered to express diverse perspectives and are made to feel valued, energised and rewarded for their ideas and creativity.

ABOUT OUR RESEARCH DATA AND ANALYTICS TEAM

The Research Data & Analytics Team within R&D IT is a global team of highly experienced data, AI and technology professionals who are passionate about delivering innovative products and services. Our mission is to transform the way the R&D discovers and develops medicines through data, analytics, and AI. To achieve this, we partner with scientific teams to deliver the groundbreaking capabilities, products and platforms that accelerate the discovery of life-changing medicines.

SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING PLATFORM

The Scientific Computing platform (SCP) is a foundational capability for HPC and scaled computing solutions. Embedded within the Research D&A organisation it is central to analytics products focused on computational chemistry, imaging, multi-OMICs, structural biology, data science and AI.

The SCP team is accountable for the end-to-end delivery of high-performance analytics products, with an emphasis on augmenting the HPC experience. We combine modern HPC with a powerful DevOps stack and cloud-native technologies to power research and development at AstraZeneca.

ABOUT THE PLATFORM

We are looking for highly skilled engineers to join our team developing a modern, scalable scientific computing and AI platform. You will be a member of an agile DevOps team, working together to design and build platform services and also end-to-end solutions supporting the computational needs of leading scientists.

Are you passionate about the "High-Performance" in HPC? The successful candidate will bring deep knowledge in one or more technologies relating to HPC and contribute to specific projects in those areas of expertise, while also having the opportunity to gain broad knowledge across other technology areas. These may include Infrastructure as Code (IaC), container technology, or integration with public cloud providers.

Key Accountabilities

Depending on interests and background, responsibilities may include

• Deploying new applications and services to private or public cloud, using IaC, configuration management and CI/CD
• Operational support for the platform and deployed services, including direct engagement with end-users
• Architecting solutions for new scientific workflows, building on platform capabilities with opensource software or vendor partnerships
• Acting as an agile team to define objectives and requirements with customers. Creating implementation proposals and iterating design, test and build cycles to deliver valuable services
• Creating architecture diagrams, documenting processes and conducting product demonstrations and knowledge transfer

Candidate Knowledge, Skills, and Experience

• Bachelor's degree or higher in a quantitative or engineering field (computer science, computational biology, bioinformatics, engineering, among others); OR equivalent work experience
• Hands-on experience operating and/or engineering large-scale computing environments
• Understanding of Linux system administration, the TCP/IP stack, and storage subsystems
• HPC technologies including batch schedulers (e.g. SLURM), parallel file systems (e.g. GPFS) and high-speed networks (e.g. InfiniBand)
• Scripting using Bash and Python
• Operating and consuming virtualised private cloud resources (e.g. OpenStack)
• The HashiCorp ecosystem of products for cloud automation: Consul, Vault and Nomad, along with Terraform and Packer
• Test driven development, and testing frameworks such as pytest, testinfra, reframe HPC
• Software installation tools such as Easybuild, Spack, and environment modules for maintaining large collections of software versions
• Configuration management tools (e.g. Ansible, salt, puppet)
• Container technology and container schedulers (e.g. Docker and Singularity, Nomad and Kubernetes)
• CI/CD GitHub/GitLab Actions

Desirable skills

• Experience with application profiling and performance tuning
• Operation and configuration of public cloud computing infrastructure (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Proven development experience with a variety of programming languages (e.g. Java/C++, Python/Ruby/Perl, SQL, AWS)

SO, WHAT NEXT?

If reading the above has tickled your senses and you’re ready to join us, hit the apply button and we look forward to reviewing your application soon.