SCP Technical Lead HPC Applications & Workflows

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, skilled data and AI engineers and professionals, passionate about delivering innovative services and products. The mission of our team is to transform the way the R&D discovers and develops medicine through data, analytics, and AI. To achieve this, we partner with scientific teams to deliver ground-breaking capabilities, products and platforms that enable scientists to accelerate medicines that are safe and effective for patients.

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.
We are 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

The SCP team provides the high-performance computing (HPC) platform and optimised applications on which scientists build their workflows. We are driven to accelerate scientific discovery, and achieve this through rapid deployment of applications, optimisation of complex workflows and application tuning for very large problems. An overarching principle is to maximise the impact of the team's support efforts.

We are seeking a passionate, HPC applications specialist to join the team as a Technical Lead with responsibility for applications strategy, delivery and support. The ideal candidate will have extensive hands-on experience making an impact with HPC technology, be able to relate to the scientific community and also play a leading role within the platform team.

The HPC applications landscape is continually evolving. You will be responsible for sourcing the optimal technologies to deliver industry-leading capabilities, including application build frameworks, containerised applications and cloud software-as-a-service. Automated application deployment is a key feature and the Technical Lead for Applications will have oversight of the end-to-end application process, from creating build templates and testing through version control and automated deployment.

You will work directly with key customers to understand the current and future computational and AI challenges. In response to new project requirements, you will help architect solutions using the platform portfolio of existing services or create new services together with a development team, and maintain ongoing relationships with key users and R&D partners.

Within the leadership team, collaborate to define future platform architectures, software paradigms and support models to face the next generation of computational challenges. Expect to promote the team's work internally and externally through seminars, posters and capability demonstrations.

Key Accountabilities

* Defining standards for application deployment, testing and lifecycle management including the use of build frameworks such as Easybuild and CI/CD
* Overall responsibility for the application service across our platforms, including how-to guides, efficient job scheduling, and application tuning and benchmarking
* Promote optimal use of HPC technologies such as MPI, GPUs and high-speed, low latency storage
* Technical leadership for diagnostic activities, such as solving application scalability or data bottleneck issues
* Support the overall platform mission, and actively shape strategic direction as a member of the leadership team
* Support strong community engagement and communicate news and updates

Candidate Knowledge, Skills, and Experience

* Bachelor's, Masters or Doctorate degree in a quantitative or engineering field or equivalent work experience delivering innovative HPC and/or AI/ML solutions
* Advanced knowledge of Linux systems and HPC cluster technologies, including a job scheduler such as SLURM
* Experience with frameworks for software distribution services such as Easybuild or Spack
* Excellent programming and debugging skills in one or more programming languages such as C/C++ and Python
* Proficient in compiling software from source code, including debugging errors and resolving dependencies
* Hands-on knowledge of a range of scientific and HPC applications such as simulation software, bioinformatics tools or 3D data visualisation packages
* Experience in profiling and benchmarking HPC applications in distributed environments for example using tools like Perf, Likwid, NVIDIA Nsight, Intel Vtune Profiler
* Familiarity with container runtimes such as Docker, Singularity or enroot
* Desirable Skills and Knowledge
* Knowledge in a specific domain, such as deep learning, medical imaging, molecular dynamics or 'omics.
* Expertise in GPU technologies such as the NVidia HPC SDK and/or GPU-enabled deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or MXNet
* Experience with parallel programming and libraries, ideally MPI, MPI-IO, OpenMP, OpenCL and OpenACC
* Experience with frameworks for regression tests and benchmarks for HPC applications, like Reframe HPC
* Hands-on experience working in a DevOps team and using agile methodologies