Lab Administrator

About the role

The Lab Administrator is responsible for the setup, maintenance, security and day-to-day operation of a technical and research lab environment, including servers, storage systems, networking equipment and lab-issued workstations. The goal is to ensure high availability, performance and compliance with organizational policies.

Key responsibilities

• Install, configure and maintain lab hardware (servers, storage arrays, NICs, switches) and software (OS images, drivers, monitoring tools)
• Manage user access, accounts and permissions across lab systems
• Monitor system health, performance and capacity (CPU, memory, storage, network utilization)
• Troubleshoot hardware and software issues and coordinate with vendors for support and RMA
• Maintain documentation such as network diagrams, asset inventories, configuration baselines and SOPs
• Implement and enforce security policies (patching, firewall rules, access controls)
• Manage backups, disaster recovery procedures and data retention policies
• Support researchers and engineers with environment setup for experiments, benchmarks or testing (compute nodes, storage volumes, network configurations)
• Track licensing, warranties and hardware lifecycle, and coordinate lab scheduling and resource allocation if shared across teams

Required profile

• Strong Linux administration experience (Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS)
• Networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, VLANs, bonding/LACP, basic troubleshooting)
• Experience with storage systems; SAN/NAS and parallel filesystems such as Lustre or GPFS are a plus
• Good documentation and communication skills

Required skills

• Scripting with Bash and Python for automation
• Familiarity with virtualization and containerization (KVM, Docker) is a plus
• Monitoring tools such as Prometheus/Grafana, Nagios or Zabbix
• Understanding of hardware components (CPUs, NUMA, PCIe, NICs/RDMA)
• Nice to have: HPC/AI infrastructure (InfiniBand, RDMA, GPU clusters) and configuration management (Ansible, Puppet)