Staff HPC Systems Software Engineer
Nscale · United Kingdom
About Nscale
Nscale is the GPU cloud engineered for AI. We provide cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI start-ups and large enterprise customers. Nscale enables AI-focused companies to achieve superior results by reducing the complexity of AI development. Our GPU cloud bolsters technical capabilities and directly supports strategic business outcomes, including cost management, rapid innovation, and environmental responsibility.
We thrive on a culture of relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member takes pride in their work and drives it with excellence and urgency. As an Nscaler, you’llbuild trust through openness and transparency, where everyone is inspired to do their best work. If you join our team, you’ll be contributing to building the technology that powers the future.
About The Role
We’re hiring a Staff HPC Systems Software Engineer to define the technical direction and evolution of a core HPC platform domain at Nscale. In this role, you will operate beyond a single team, shaping how multiple teams build, automate, and run Slurm-based capabilities within Nscale’s wider cloud-native platform. You’ll work across engineering boundaries to bring coherence to architecture, interfaces, lifecycle models, and operational approaches, while partnering closely with teams working on platform tooling, infrastructure APIs, identity systems, and Kubernetes-adjacent systems.
This is a high-impact staff-level role for someone who combines deep hands-on software engineering with strong systems judgement. Your work will help ensure Nscale’s HPC services are robust, supportable, and maintainable, while creating leverage through shared patterns, reusable implementations, and clear technical direction across ambiguous, business-critical problem spaces.
What You'll Be Doing
Domain Architecture & Technical Direction
- Own and evolve the technical direction for a defined HPC systems domain, such as Slurm platform architecture, scheduler integrations, cluster lifecycle, workload environments or service automation.
- Make architectural decisions that balance software quality, operational realities, customer needs, and long-term maintainability.
- Define how proven Slurm implementations should be packaged, automated and exposed as a service.
- Resolve ambiguity around ownership, interfaces, lifecycle boundaries, and operating models across teams.
- Act as the technical escalation point for the most complex issues within the domain.
Cross-Team Engineering Leverage
- Establish shared patterns for automation, service lifecycle management, observability, reliability and supportability across the HPC platform.
- Drive cross-team design for integrations between Slurm, Kubernetes-adjacent systems, infrastructure APIs, identity systems and platform tooling.
- Create reusable modules, automation, deployment patterns, and reference implementations that increase engineering leverage.
- Identity and correct avoidable technical divergence, duplicated effort and fragile operating models
- Ensure domain designs reflect the realities of GPU scheduling, HPC networking, performance isolation and production operations.
Delivery, Reliability & Influence
- Lead technically critical initiatives spanning 2-4 teams or a defined HPC platform area.
- Unblocked delivery by clarifying technical direction and reducing ambiguity in complex system design problems.
- Contribute hands-on where needed to de-risk or accelerate critical work.
- Influence engineering teams without formal authority through strong judgement, design clarity and practical solutions.
- Partner with adjacent cloud-native software engineers so HPC implementations build on shared platform patterns rather than separate ones.
KPIs
- Technical direction across a defined HPC domain
- Delivery of critical initiatives across 2-4 teams
- Reduction in technical divergence and duplicated effort
- Reliability and supportability of Slurm-based HPC services
About You
- Extensive experience designing and building production software and automation for HPC systems, especially Slurm-based environments.
- Strong track record of writing maintainable, testable and resilient software in Go, Python or similar languages.
- Proven ability to define technical direction across a domain spanning multiple teams or services.
- Strong understanding of Slurm internals, scheduler behaviour, cluster lifecycle concerns and operational trade offs.
- Strong practical understanding of GPU-backed infrastructure and HPC networking, including InfiniBand, RoCE, RDMA and performance sensitive workload characteristics.
- Experience integrating HPC systems with cloud-native platforms, APIs, or service delivery models.
- Experience creating engineering leverage through standards, reusable patterns, shared tooling and architectural clarity.
- Strong judgement in balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform health and supportability.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to align multiple teams around a coherent technical direction.
- Experience with other schedulers or batch systems such as Kueue is valuable.
What We Can Offer You
You’ll have the opportunity to help shape the operating standards behind a next-generation AI
cloud platform, working on complex infrastructure challenges with real ownership and impact. This
is a chance to play a meaningful role in scaling high-performance, sustainable data centre
operations in a fast-moving environment
Equal Opportunities Statement
We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with
disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic
backgrounds.
If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.
The responsibilities outlined in this job description are not exhaustive and are intended to
provide a general overview of the position. The employee may be required to perform additional
duties, tasks, and responsibilities as assigned by management, consistent with the skills and
qualifications required for the role.