Research Infrastructure Team Lead

Job description

Morgan Hunt are currently recruiting for a Research Infrastructure Team Lead on a permanent basis on behalf of our public sector client based in Dundee.

This role can be worked remotely from anywhere in the UK, with 1 site visit per quarter.

Salary: £43k - £58k DOE

Benefits:

• 39 days annual leave a year
• Remote/Hybrid working Options
• 31% Pension Contribution (21% Employer)

The organisation has run a Safe Haven environment and a secure infrastructure for research and clinical data collection for over a decade. Safe Havens are used across the UK for statistical investigation of sensitive data. The Organisation are researching and implementing a new cloud-based infrastructure which enhances this functionality to be scalable, support big data such as genomic and imaging data, allow programming within the environment and support AI and Machine Learning. The role holder will provide expertise and be part of the team implementing this next generation Safe Haven environment and secure research computing platform. They will have the opportunity to develop it in line with future requirements, while also contributing to the smooth running of the infrastructure operations of a 50-person research group.

Duties Include:

• Leading, planning and managing the infrastructure team, maintaining productive relationships with the wider team and key stakeholders such as the Organisation's IT department you will support the development of the secure cloud TRE and enable the smooth running of the rest of the research computing infrastructure maintained by the team which includes on-prem compute and circa 1.5PB of storage spread across 4 data-centres, cloud-native public cloud infrastructure, a mix of Linux and Windows comprising a permanent estate size of circa 100 servers, with VDI scaling that up to around a maximum of 350 machines.
• You will bring together the expertise of the infrastructure team and liaise with the management team to determine, support, facilitate and deliver the strategic direction of the research infrastructure provision and capability which underpin HIC's service offerings and enable world leading research.
• Your broad technical understanding will allow you to make accurate judgements about time estimations, manage risks, organise, and track project deliverables and maintain a current roadmap of information systems direction.
• Responsible for implementing security by design and maintaining and developing the technical information security controls in collaboration with the Information Security & Governance manager. You'll also prioritise the remediation of vulnerabilities and installation of outstanding patches identified across the infrastructure estate.
• You will work closely with project managers, developers, data analysts, information governance staff and research project team members to design and implement the infrastructure and services that enable their work. This will entail custom project infrastructure configuration/build using a combination of dedicated local hardware and multi-institution distributed private and public cloud.
• You will be introduced to the security requirements for a Safe Haven / TRE environment and support the technological solutions being developed to enhance the functionality of existing Safe Havens to support next generation requirements such as AI and Machine Learning, development of novel research software stacks, programming/engineering capabilities within the environment, HPC, bioinformatics, support for images and genomic data, secure export of algorithms and Machine Learning models, secure ingress of source code, research reproducibility and scalability.
• You will work with the team to develop the management and monitoring tools and system processes to operate the infrastructure in an optimal, proactive manner. As the infrastructure evolves, you will help design, implement, and operate the processes and tools required to deliver the business commitments of the institution.
• You will take a role in design and implementation and may also be a hands-on developer of new system components as required. You will be expected to include non-functional aspects such as performance, security, testability, and compliance in addition to the functional aspects and to create well-structured solutions of clearly defined components and interfaces.
• You will liaise with a wide range of professionals with varying degrees of understanding of complex infrastructure systems and to communicate clearly on complex specialist issues in plain and engaging language.
• As part of an ISO27001 accredited organisation, you'll put security first in designs and decisions, keep abreast of data governance standards, the use of privacy enhancing technologies, trusted third parties and other methods essential for the safe use of highly sensitive data.

Experience & Skills:

• Relevant industry certifications such as RHCE, MCSE, Security , CISSP, OSCP, project management or cloud vendor certs.
• Implementation of computing system(s) in public/hybrid cloud.
• Experience of research software or infrastructure engineering.
• Exposure to ITIL or another similar service management framework.
• Familiarity with principles from the DevOps or site reliability engineering fields
• Infrastructure as Code technologies (such as Ansible, Terraform and CloudFormation).
• Cloud platform engineering such as AWS, Azure, GCP; Cloud platform security.
• Containerisation and orchestration such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with research computing software such as Jupyterhub, Python and R.
• Understanding of networking technologies (e.g., switching, routing and physical cabling).
• Monitoring and management systems (Check_MK, Prometheus etc).

Morgan Hunt is a multi-award-winning recruitment business for interim, contract and temporary recruitment and acts as an Employment Agency in relation to permanent vacancies. Morgan Hunt is an equal opportunities employer. Job suitability is assessed on merit in accordance with the individual's skills, qualifications and abilities to perform the relevant duties required in a particular role.