Student Assistant II - High Performance Computing

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research•Boulder, CO

About The Position

The Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) is seeking a motivated Student Assistant to join the CIRRUS platform team. CIRRUS is a modern, cloud-native, Kubernetes-based scientific computing platform spanning bare-metal clusters at facilities in Boulder and Cheyenne. The position works alongside systems engineers and scientific researchers to support platform reliability, improve documentation, and help onboard scientific workloads. The role is structured for professional growth. The student will begin by verifying workflows and improving documentation usability, then gradually gain hands-on experience in cloud-native platform operations and high-performance computing infrastructure under the supervision of senior staff. This is a one-year term role with the possibility of extension for an additional year. The student must maintain student status throughout the appointment and may not work more than 1,000 hours in any 12-month period. The hourly rate is $23.81. Final salary and rates are based on education, experience, and skills relevant to the role.

Requirements

Must be enrolled, and intend to enroll in the next regular session, for credit in an accredited secondary or post-secondary school, college or university, or an eligible trade school.
Must maintain student status for the entire duration of the appointment.
Basic familiarity with Linux and containers such as Docker or Podman, gained through coursework, personal projects, or prior work.
Ability to work with a team and convey technical concepts to engineers and platform users.
Good oral and written communication skills, with an aptitude for clear technical writing and documentation.
Ability to follow moderately complex procedures and practices.

Nice To Haves

Experience with at least one scripting language such as Python or Bash.
Interest in Kubernetes.
Familiarity with Git and version control.
Familiarity with scientific or high-performance computing environments.

Responsibilities

Test and verify platform workflows, new functionality, and supporting documentation before release.
Review documentation as an end user to confirm it is accurate, complete, and easy to understand, and provide written feedback and recommendations for improvement.
Validate that documented procedures produce expected results on the Kubernetes-based CIRRUS environment.
Develop and maintain reusable, repeatable workflows to validate new workloads onboarded to the platform.
Modify and run existing workflows, scripts, and manifests, and propose improvements to the validation process.
Document workflows so other team members and platform users can reuse them.
Author, edit, and improve CIRRUS documentation, including user-facing guides and onboarding material for scientific and HPC-background users.
Write clear technical documentation and potentially help produce technical reports, walkthroughs, or presentations about platform functionality.
Develop knowledge of the CIRRUS platform and atmospheric and Earth system science workloads.
Gain experience with platform operations under the supervision of senior staff.
Perform additional tasks as assigned.