Job Description

Virginia Tech’s Advanced Research Computing (ARC) organization is seeking applications to fill the role of Computational Scientist. In ARC, the computational scientists are primarily researcher-facing but also have various technical and administrative roles.

The computational scientist will:
- Assisting researchers with basic computational tasks and providing support for more advanced computational aspects of their projects
- Regularly engage with researchers, with ARC systems, and with the systems engineering team to promote and generally work to advance the mission of ARC through outreach activities
- Participating in ARC training sessions and workshops, and assisting in the development of educational materials
- Provide support and assistance to researchers and the ARC Helpdesk team

Virginia Tech has researchers with computational needs from a broad spectrum of domain areas. ARC enables groundbreaking research and discovery by providing centralized, scalable computing resources and advanced research computing and visualization services. ARC systems currently host 50,000+ CPU cores, 500+ advanced GPUs, and 10+ petabytes of storage. We stay abreast of novel and developing trends in research computing and attempt to deliver high-value systems suited to the needs exhibited by the VT research community.

This position offers opportunities to mentor students, contribute to open-source software projects, attend research and trade conferences, and participate in funding proposals for sponsored projects. ARC serves a large and diverse research community,
and we seek applications from people of all backgrounds, especially from those belonging to groups that are often underrepresented in STEM fields.

Required Qualifications

- Master's degree or equivalent in a computational research discipline
- Have a service mindset
- Ability to communicate technical details to audiences with varying levels of technical experience
- Comfortable working in a Linux environment, using command-line utilities and scripting languages and with experience using computational clusters (e.g., building software, run-time environment configuration, performance monitoring, shell tools, or scripting)
- Familiarity with programming paradigms commonly used in computational research
- Able to organize and optimize computational workflows in a research setting
- Exposure to computational or data-rich/big-data research workflows
- Exposure to skills and methodologies associated with software design, modification, compilation, and use

Preferred Qualifications

- Advanced degree with an emphasis on computational research
- Experience conducting computational research in a relevant field (e.g., artificial intelligence/machine learning, bioinformatics, materials engineering, computational fluid dynamics, etc.)
- Exposure to multiple computational research fields or application areas such
as bioinformatics, finite-element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, computational chemistry, materials engineering, and AI/ML
- Advanced knowledge of related areas of IT, particularly issues around the use of high-performance computing, high-performance networking, tools to support collaborative research, cloud storage, computing, and other technology used in the computational research arena
- Experience in computational biology, bioinformatics, and “omics” fields is especially desirable
- Awareness of compliance issues surrounding research data, including federal requirements and granting agency norms