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)