Lab Administrator

• Role Summary
• Responsible for the setup, maintenance, security, and day-to-day operation of a technical/research lab environment (servers, storage systems, networking equipment, and lab-issued workstations), ensuring high availability, performance, and compliance with organizational policies.

Key Responsibilities

Install, configure, and maintain lab hardware (servers, storage arrays, NICs, switches) and software (OS images, drivers, monitoring tools)

Manage user access, accounts, and permissions across lab systems

Monitor system health, performance, and capacity (CPU, memory, storage, network utilization)

Troubleshoot hardware/software issues and coordinate with vendors for support/RMAs

Maintain documentation: network diagrams, asset inventories, configuration baselines, SOPs

Implement and enforce security policies (patching, firewall rules, access controls)

Manage backups, disaster recovery procedures, and data retention policies

Support researchers/engineers with environment setup for experiments, benchmarks, or testing (e.g., provisioning compute nodes, storage volumes, network configs)

Track licensing, warranties, and hardware lifecycle (procurement to decommissioning)

Coordinate lab scheduling/resource allocation if shared across teams

Required Skills/Qualifications

Strong Linux administration experience (Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS)

Networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, VLANs, bonding/LACP, basic troubleshooting)

Experience with storage systems (SAN/NAS, parallel filesystems like Lustre/GPFS a plus)

Scripting ability (Bash, Python) for automation

Familiarity with virtualization/containerization (KVM, Docker) is a plus

Experience with monitoring tools (Prometheus/Grafana, Nagios, Zabbix)

Understanding of hardware components (CPUs, NUMA architecture, PCIe, NICs/RDMA)

Good documentation and communication skills

Nice to Have

Experience with HPC/AI infrastructure (InfiniBand, RDMA, GPU clusters)

Experience with configuration management (Ansible, Puppet)