HPC Architect

AbbVie•North Chicago, IL

14d•$109,500 - $208,500

About The Position

AbbVie Information Research (IR) Scientific and Cloud Computing team is seeking a highly motivated High Performance Computing (HPC) Architect to provide technical leadership for scientific and R&D computing environments. This role is responsible for architecting and evolving on-premises, cloud, and hybrid HPC platforms, including compute, GPU, networking, storage, workload management, containers, automation, security, and scientific software services. The successful candidate will have strong hands-on experience with HPC infrastructure, AWS, and hybrid cloud environments, Slurm, infrastructure as code, automation, DevOps practices, and enterprise IT operations. The HPC Architect will guide the design, implementation, lifecycle management, and support of secure, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solutions while partnering with R&D stakeholders and fostering collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, IT, or related field with 7 years of experience; OR Master’s Degree with 6 years of experience; OR PhD 2 years’ experience.
Respective years of experience in application program development.
Leadership experience is required, including the ability to guide, collaborate with and influence technical teams, projects, and workstreams both within and outside the organizational structure. Demonstrated ability to balance technical depth with people leadership and stakeholder management.
Expert knowledge of Linux, HPC compute and GPU architectures, CPU/memory/NUMA/PCIe design, MPI, NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA, MIG, node provisioning, firmware, drivers, and hardware lifecycle management.
Strong experience with Slurm, including partitions, queues, scheduling policies, resource management, GPU scheduling, accounting, troubleshooting, and performance optimization.
Strong knowledge of HPC networking, including Mellanox/NVIDIA InfiniBand, RDMA, Aruba switching, Ethernet, VLANs, routing, segmentation, subnet management, monitoring, and low-latency communications.
Experience with high-performance and distributed storage, including Weka or comparable platforms, Lustre, NFS, CIFS/SMB, storage gateways, quotas, permissions, data movement, replication, backup, archival, and recovery.
Experience integrating Active Directory or equivalent identity services with SSH, SSSD, sudo, service accounts, security groups, filesystem permissions, and least-privilege access models.
Experience with Apptainer/Singularity, Docker-compatible workflows, container security, reproducibility, GPU/MPI enablement, image management, and scientific software environments using modules, compilers, Python, R, CUDA, and related dependencies.
Experience supporting interactive research platforms such as Posit Workbench, Posit Connect, Jupyter, or comparable tools, including integration with Slurm, GPUs, identity services, storage, and software environments.
Experience architecting cloud and hybrid HPC solutions, including networking, security, identity, provisioning, storage, autoscaling, infrastructure as code, workload placement, cost management, monitoring, and lifecycle operations.
Strong scripting, automation, and DevOps skills.
Knowledge of observability, centralized logging, alerting, incident response, root-cause analysis, capacity planning, performance engineering, cybersecurity, vulnerability management, encryption, patching, and access governance.
Experience creating architecture diagrams, technical standards, operating models, runbooks, migration plans, lifecycle strategies, and executive-level recommendations.
Experience working in Data Science, Life Sciences, or Pharmaceutical industry working in regulated or enterprise IT environments.

Nice To Haves

Work experience in the pharmaceutical industry preferred.

Responsibilities

Serve as the technical architect for AbbVie IR’s on-premises, cloud, and hybrid HPC based scientific-computing environments. Responsible for architecture, standards, infrastructure (software and hardware) lifecycle, evaluation of POC, capacity planning, and cost management.
Architect and continuously evolve all aspects of scientific HPC computing platforms, including operational and maintenance processes.
Design, implement, and support HPC compute and networking infrastructure - compute, networking, and storage.
Administer and optimize Slurm workload management, including partitions, queues, priorities, fair-share, reservations, resource limits, GPU scheduling, accounting, job troubleshooting, performance tuning, and integration with Posit and other research platforms.
Establish secure, reproducible container and scientific software environments using Apptainer/Singularity, Docker-compatible workflows, environment modules, compilers, MPI, CUDA, Python, R, and application dependencies.
Assist with the architecture and support of Posit Workbench, Posit Connect, Posit Package Manager, and related analytics platforms, integrating them with Slurm, Active Directory, storage, GPUs, and scientific software.
Implement secure identity and access management in accordance with AbbVie security SOPs and applicable industry standards. Architect, implement, and support vulnerability-management processes and remediation efforts.
Lead efforts to automate provisioning, configuration, patching, testing, monitoring, remediation, and lifecycle activities.
Maintain observability metrics, architecture diagrams, inventories, dependency maps, configuration standards, runbooks, support procedures, and end-of-life plans while addressing technical debt, operational risks, and capacity constraints. Lead the development of appropriate reporting and monitoring tools and dashboards.
Lead design and incident reviews, vendor engagements, proofs of concept, capacity planning, and implementation governance; provide technical direction and mentorship to engineering and partner teams.
Partner with R&D to create appropriate solutions for research workloads.