Cyberinfrastructure Engineer

Department

PSD Enrico Fermi Institute: Gardner Group

About the Department

The MANIAC Lab, located within the Enrico Fermi Institute of the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago, builds and operates advanced cyberinfrastructure for scientific instruments investigating the fundamental mysteries of nature. The Lab operates data-intensive high-throughput computing facilities that are part of a global computing grid used to reconstruct and analyze particle collisions recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland (https://atlas.cern). The Lab also serves as a gateway for U.S. researchers to national cyberinfrastructure resources through the Open Science Grid Consortium (OSG) and the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP).

The Lab operates the NSF Shared Tier 3 Analysis Facility (https://af.uchicago.edu). The facility supports ATLAS physicists analyzing the complete LHC Run 2 and Run 3 datasets as the collaboration prepares for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), which begins with Run 4 around 2030. It provides computing infrastructure and services for the South Pole Telescope (SPT-3G) and operates a worldwide distributed data network for the XENON dark matter search experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy.

The Lab is increasingly focused on AI-enabled research computing. Its GPU platforms support machine learning training and inference, including models served through NVIDIA Triton and large language models hosted on facility hardware. The Lab has also built an agentic AI platform based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It gives researchers' AI assistants secure, identity-brokered access to facility services such as HTCondor, Kubernetes, Rucio, and ServiceX. The same platform supports AI-assisted facility operations, where sandboxed agents analyze operational metrics and propose corrective actions for human review.

The Lab provides the Scalable Systems Laboratory (SSL), a software testing and integration platform for IRIS-HEP. IRIS-HEP develops software and computing solutions for the HL-LHC era. Through the SSL Deployment Factory, the Lab is packaging the Kubernetes infrastructure it already operates into tested, versioned bundles that other facilities can deploy. These bundles are bootstrapped with Kubespray and managed through GitOps with Flux, and cover services such as JupyterHub, BinderHub, ServiceX, and the MCP platform. The goal is to shorten a process that currently takes months of manual work at each site.

Job Summary

As the Cyberinfrastructure Engineer at the MANIAC Lab within the Enrico Fermi Institute, you will report directly to Research Assistant Professor Giordon Stark. As part of our team (https://maniaclab.uchicago.edu), you will help build and operate advanced cyberinfrastructure for science collaborations such as the ATLAS experiment at the CERN LHC. These collaborations rely on data-intensive, distributed computing technologies such as HTCondor, Kubernetes, and Ceph.

The Cyberinfrastructure Engineer will help operate the storage, compute, and GPU infrastructure in the University's campus data centers. This infrastructure connects researchers to the national-scale OSG fabric and to emerging AI/ML service platforms. The work combines hands-on Linux systems administration and on-site hardware support with cloud-native operations using Kubernetes, Helm, containers, and GitOps tooling. It also involves distributed storage (Ceph via Rook, ZFS), configuration management (Puppet), and monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana).

The team is collaborative and partly distributed. We meet weekly over Zoom and coordinate daily in Slack. Team members are expected to take ownership of their work and function independently. The position is jointly supported by the ATLAS Midwest Tier 2 Center (MWT2), focused on production operations, and by IRIS-HEP, focused on building the infrastructure that enables AI agents to drive physics analysis and facility operations for the HL-LHC era.

Responsibilities

• Facility operations (MWT2 and the UChicago Analysis Facility, approximately 50%)
• Provides systems administrative services for Linux compute clusters (CPU and GPU), storage systems, and related support servers. These systems support ATLAS production and analysis at the Midwest Tier 2 Center and the Analysis Facility.
• Operates, upgrades, and scales Ceph distributed storage (including Rook-managed Ceph on Kubernetes). The goal is to meet growing HL-LHC capacity and throughput requirements.
• Performs on-site hardware work in campus data centers, including installing, retrofitting, and replacing servers, storage, and GPUs. Manages vendor support cases and spare-parts inventory.
• Maintains monitoring, dashboards, and alerting (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana) for storage, compute, network, and hardware health.
• Applies operating system and service security patches and vulnerability mitigations in coordination with University security requirements.
• Performs network diagnostics, throughput measurement, and analysis for both LAN and WAN. Supports the facility's participation in WLCG Data Challenges and HL-LHC readiness scale tests.
• Participates in the team's operations support rotation and maintains documentation and operational runbooks.
• Agentic research infrastructure (IRIS-HEP, approximately 50%)
• Deploys and operates the infrastructure for agent-driven physics analysis. This includes the Lab's MCP gateway, the MCP servers it brokers access to, and the credential services behind them. Together, these let researchers' AI assistants securely use facility resources such as HTCondor, Kubernetes, Rucio, and ServiceX.
• Supports IRIS-HEP integration challenges and demonstrations of end-to-end agentic analysis workflows. The work spans dataset discovery, batch processing, analysis, and inference run through AI agents.
• Operates GPU platforms for m