Lead IT Systems Administrator (Linux & HPC) in Leatherhead

KBR is a global provider of differentiated, professional services and technologies delivered across a wide government, defense and industrial base. Drawing from its rich 100-year history and culture of innovation and mission focus, KBR creates sustainable value by combining engineering, technical and scientific expertise with its full life cycle capabilities to help our clients meet their most pressing challenges today and into the future.

The Lead IT Systems Administrator (Linux & HPC) is responsible for the administration, maintenance, security and operational reliability of Linux-based enterprise and high-performance computing platforms. The role provides hands-on technical ownership while coordinating and supervising the daily technical activities of colleagues supporting Linux and HPC services, setting priorities and helping ensure operational commitments are met. A major focus will be the operation of cloud and co-located HPC platforms. The position requires extensive Linux engineering experience and practical knowledge of HPC environments, including NVIDIA Base Command Manager, Azure CycleCloud and SLURM.

Key Responsibilities

• Administer, configure, patch, harden and upgrade enterprise Linux server platforms, with particular emphasis on RedHat Enterprise Linux or comparable distributions.
• Manage core Linux services including identity and access integration, SSH, DNS client configuration, time synchronisation, software repositories, filesystems, logging and scheduled services.
• Automate repeatable administration using shell scripting and configuration-management or orchestration tooling.
• Monitor Linux performance, availability, capacity and security, and resolve complex operating-system and application integration issues.
• Maintain build standards, technical documentation, operational procedures and recovery runbooks.
• Operate and support HPC clusters spanning management, login, compute and storage components.
• Administer SLURM, including queues and partitions, scheduling policies, job submission, accounting, fair-share, reservations and troubleshooting failed or poorly performing workloads.
• Support NVIDIA Base Command Manager and Azure CycleCloud for cluster provisioning, node lifecycle management, monitoring and integration with SLURM.
• Work with engineering and scientific users to diagnose job, compiler, library, MPI, resource-allocation and performance issues.
• Plan and execute maintenance activities while protecting service availability and active workloads.
• Administer physical and virtual server infrastructure and support hardware lifecycle, firmware and operating-system maintenance.
• Support Cisco compute infrastructure and its integration with Linux and HPC management services.
• Operate and support NetApp file and data services used by Linux and HPC platforms, including provisioning, permissions, capacity, performance and availability.
• Apply a working understanding of high-speed networking, IP addressing, routing, DNS, NFS, network dependencies and storage connectivity to end-to-end troubleshooting.
• Collaborate with network, security, application and storage specialists, vendors and service providers to resolve cross-domain incidents.
• Apply secure configuration, least privilege, vulnerability remediation and audit controls to Linux and HPC systems.
• Ensure backup, restore and disaster-recovery requirements are defined, implemented and regularly tested for supported platforms.
• Monitor service health and capacity, respond to incidents, identify root cause and contribute to problem management.
• Plan and deliver changes through established change-management processes, including risk assessment, testing, implementation and back-out planning.
• Participate in an appropriate operational support or on-call arrangement where required.
• Provide technical guidance, peer review and knowledge transfer to infrastructure colleagues and service-desk teams.
• Develop, implement and continuously improve Linux and HPC operational processes, procedures, standards and controls in response to service, security and business requirements.
• Provide day-to-day technical direction, peer review, coaching and knowledge transfer to infrastructure colleagues and service-desk teams, escalating resource or priority conflicts to the manager where required.

Qualifications, Skills and Experience

Essential Technical Skills & Experience

• Substantial hands-on experience administering Linux in a complex enterprise or research-computing environment.
• Practical experience supporting HPC clusters and diagnosing issues across compute, scheduler, storage and network layers.
• Strong operational knowledge of SLURM administration and workload troubleshooting.
• Competence in Bash or another relevant scripting language, with a track record of automating administrative tasks.
• Experience with Linux performance analysis, capacity management, patching, security hardening and vulnerability remediation.
• Experience operating shared file services and troubleshooting NFS, permissions, throughput, latency and capacity issues.
• Working knowledge of enterprise networking fundamentals and distributed-system dependencies.
• Experience delivering controlled technical change and maintaining accurate documentation in a structured IT service-management environment.

Desirable Technical Skills & Experience

• Experience with NVIDIA Base Command Manager, Bright Cluster Manager or a comparable HPC cluster-management platform.
• Experience with Cisco compute platforms and associated server-management tooling.
• Experience administering NetApp storage in Linux or HPC environments.
• Knowledge of InfiniBand or other high-speed, low-latency fabrics.
• Experience with MPI workloads, environment modules, compilers, engineering or scientific applications, and common HPC software stacks.
• Experience with Ansible, Git and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Experience with virtualisation, containers or cloud-hosted Linux workloads.
• Knowledge of backup, recovery, monitoring and observability platforms used in enterprise infrastructure.

Professional Capability

• Experience operating as a senior or lead technical professional, coordinating the daily work of others, setting priorities and ensuring operational tasks are completed.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex troubleshooting, projects and service changes with notable risk, using policies, procedures and business plans to guide decisions and escalation.
• Able to translate business and service objectives into clear technical priorities, provide direction and guidance, and communicate effectively with specialists, non-specialists, managers and stakeholders.
• Strong operational leadership, sound judgement and accountability for secure, reliable and supportable services, including the ability to balance delivery, risk, capacity and customer impact.
• Collaborative leadership approach with evidence of coaching colleagues, supervising technical activity and developing or implementing improved processes and procedures.

Education & Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computing, engineering or a related field with typically 5+ years of relevant experience, or an equivalent combination of professional training and substantial practical experience.
• Relevant Linux, HPC, Cisco, NVIDIA or NetApp certifications are advantageous but not essential.

Physical Requirements

All employees have a responsibility to work safely and to abide by health and safety legislation and policies.