Information Technology Architect

Associated Universities • Socorro, NM

3d

About The Position

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), managed and operated by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation, is seeking an experienced Enterprise IT Technology Architect. The role provides strategic and technical architectural leadership for the infrastructure and platform ecosystem supporting NRAO’s scientific mission. The architect defines, designs, and guides implementation of scalable, resilient, high-performance architectures for scientific computing, large-scale data processing, high-capacity storage, advanced networking, and geographically distributed research infrastructure.

Working with Enterprise IT Teams, the Software Architect, and the Data Architect, the position establishes long-term technical direction for current scientific operations and the next generation of radio telescopes. It develops architectural strategies for computationally intensive scientific workloads and the generation, processing, movement, storage, and preservation of petabyte-scale scientific datasets. The successful candidate evaluates emerging technologies and turns scientific and computational requirements into actionable designs that balance performance, scalability, reliability, operational sustainability, and total cost of ownership.

The position may be based in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Socorro, New Mexico; Charlottesville, Virginia; or Green Bank, West Virginia. Remote work may be considered for well-qualified candidates. Work is typically performed in a research or development environment, and occasional domestic and international travel may be required.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related technical discipline, or an equivalent combination of education and relevant professional experience.
• At least 10 years of progressively responsible experience in enterprise infrastructure engineering, high-performance computing, large-scale networking, storage engineering, or related technical disciplines.
• At least 5 years of experience designing or architecting complex, large-scale infrastructure environments.
• Demonstrated experience designing, implementing, or providing architectural leadership for high-capacity storage and high-bandwidth network infrastructure.
• Experience supporting mission-critical, research computing, scientific, or similarly demanding data-intensive environments.
• Must be authorized to work in the United States; the Observatory cannot currently sponsor H-1B visas for this position.
• Must be able to operate a personal computer.

Nice To Haves

• Experience architecting infrastructure for scientific research institutions, national laboratories, supercomputing centers, or other large-scale research environments.
• Experience with petabyte-scale parallel file systems, particularly Lustre, IBM Storage Scale, BeeGFS, or similar platforms.
• Experience with large-scale object storage technologies such as Ceph or comparable distributed storage platforms.
• Experience with Slurm, Kubernetes, Apptainer, or similar technologies used in HPC environments.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management technologies such as Ansible, Terraform, or comparable platforms.
• Experience developing architectural strategies for exabyte-scale data growth, long-term scientific archives, and geographically distributed data processing environments.
• Experience participating in technology acquisition, vendor evaluation, technical procurement, and major infrastructure investment planning.
• Working understanding of application development, data, and data warehousing architecture.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain enterprise technology architectures, standards, principles, and reference designs for scientific computing and supporting infrastructure.
• Assist Enterprise IT technical teams in developing infrastructure and platform designs that meet scientific requirements for usability, availability, capacity, and performance.
• Establish architectural roadmaps for near-term operational requirements and long-term scientific computing demands, including 12-, 24-, and 36-month planning horizons and beyond.
• Collaborate with Enterprise IT Teams, Software Architects, and Data Architects to align infrastructure capabilities with application architectures, scientific data workflows, and data management strategies.
• Translate scientific requirements, computational workload characteristics, and anticipated data growth into infrastructure designs and implementation strategies.
• Lead technical evaluations, architectural tradeoff analyses, technology selection, and infrastructure modernization initiatives.
• Develop conceptual, logical, and physical architecture documentation, technology standards, integration specifications, and implementation recommendations.
• Evaluate infrastructure solutions against performance, availability, security, interoperability, scalability, and lifecycle cost requirements.
• Provide architectural guidance to engineering and operations teams implementing, administering, and supporting infrastructure platforms.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Benefits

• Paid time off, including 13 holidays and annual accrual of up to 24 vacation days.
• Medical, dental, and vision plans effective on the first day of employment, subject to eligibility requirements.
• Retirement benefit equal to 10 percent of a qualified participant’s base pay, with no required employee contribution.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior