Senior Computational Engineer

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital•Memphis, TN

About The Position

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is seeking a Senior Computational Engineer to design, implement, and support advanced computing solutions for research in support of the St. Jude mission. This role is a key technical contributor within High Performance Research Computing (HPRC), working closely with researchers to design efficient processes, infrastructure, software, and workflows for data acquisition and processing. Success in this role requires deep and diverse expertise in computer science and computational technologies to address the complexities of large-scale, data-intensive scientific research and meet the growing demands of AI/ML training and inference workloads. The successful candidate will bring strong computational and software engineering skills and an ability to independently solve complex technical problems. The Senior Computational Engineer will work across technologies that span high-performance computing (HPC), cloud computing, research software engineering, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and advanced data management. Experience supporting scientific environments involving bioinformatics, genomics, imaging, structural biology, computational biology, or related research domains is highly desirable.

Requirements

Master's degree in computer science, data science, information science, mathematics or a related field required.
4+ years of experience developing, optimizing, or maintaining scientific or computational applications. Graduate School projects or assistantships can count towards experience requirement.
Demonstrated working knowledge of scripting/computing languages (e.g. C/C++, Python, R, MATLAB), and parallel programming (e.g. OpenMP, MPI, Pthreads) to address complex requirements.
Independently translates understanding of business/research needs into computational plans and data workstreams within own area.
Leads critical/complex projects and analyses in line with computational plans to support business outcomes.
Shows ability to analyze, debug, tune, optimize and port scientific application codes.
Promptly and effectively responds to customer queries and requests.
Explores optimal solutions for customer needs.
Escalates/redirects effectively for quicker customer support.
Is aware of interdependencies across work and considers all parts of the work and its impact while executing own work.
Collaborates across scrum teams and contractors to deliver common team goals.
Navigates and flexes work style to requirements that can change frequently, continues to communicate and influence others.
Effectively relays understanding of diverse perspectives.
Can handle communication upwards and downwards as needed.
Presents information in a clear, well thought out way and tailored to the audience.
Shows support for the new direction even when the details have not been finalized.
Uses a data-driven approach to spot early indications of underperformance and takes corrective actions.
Celebrates successes.
Works with partners in their function to find the best solutions that align with functional priorities.
Works effectively to find solutions.
Ability to look at data more critically and draw meaningful conclusions.
Conducts root-cause analysis as needed.
Quickly rebounds from setbacks, including creating viable plans to move forward.
Helps others understand the need for change and adapt to it.

Nice To Haves

PhD in computer science, data science, information science, mathematics or a related field preferred.
Experience designing and developing computational pipelines, workflows, or software for high-performance computing systems, including workloads involving AI/ML training and inference is highly preferred.
Experience optimizing software and computational workflows for performance, scalability, and efficient execution on HPC and AI/ML systems is highly preferred.
Experience developing solutions for efficiently managing and processing large scientific datasets is highly preferred.
Experience collaborating effectively with researchers to understand scientific requirements and translate them into computational solutions is highly preferred.
Experience developing computational workflows for life sciences or other data-intensive scientific domains is highly preferred.
Demonstrated ability to deliver complex projects.
Experience collaborating across disciplines.

Responsibilities

Collaborate with investigators, research staff, stakeholders, users, subject matter experts, and solution architects to understand research needs for sustainable development, implementation, and operation of HPCF systems
Develop, deploy, optimize, and maintain scientific applications, computational, and visualization tools, data processing pipelines, and programming libraries on HPCF systems
Support investigators and research staff for porting, parallelizing, testing, debugging, and enhancing application codes and scripts to run on HPCF systems
Develop and provide documentation and training materials on applications, tools, and pipelines running on HPCF systems
Conduct testing and evaluation of new computing technologies including data processing and visualization systems/platforms
Work with the HPCF staff to develop HPCF utilization metrics, and capture, analyze and report utilization of HPCF systems
Assist in the development and implementation of plans to increase utilization of the HPCF systems and collaborations among users
Perform other duties as assigned to meet the goals and objectives of the department and institution.
Maintains regular and predictable attendance.