Lab Administrator
DDN · Columbia
Role Summary
Responsible for the setup, maintenance, security, and day-to-day operation of a technical/research lab environment (servers, storage systems, networking equipment, and lab-issued workstations), ensuring 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/software issues and coordinate with vendors for support/RMAs
Maintain documentation: network diagrams, asset inventories, configuration baselines, SOPs
Implement and enforce security policies (patching, firewall rules, access controls)
Manage backups, disaster recovery procedures, and data retention policies
Support researchers/engineers with environment setup for experiments, benchmarks, or testing (e.g., provisioning compute nodes, storage volumes, network configs)
Track licensing, warranties, and hardware lifecycle (procurement to decommissioning)
Coordinate lab scheduling/resource allocation if shared across teams
Required Skills/Qualifications
Strong Linux administration experience (Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS)
Networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, VLANs, bonding/LACP, basic troubleshooting)
Experience with storage systems (SAN/NAS, parallel filesystems like Lustre/GPFS a plus)
Scripting ability (Bash, Python) for automation
Familiarity with virtualization/containerization (KVM, Docker) is a plus
Experience with monitoring tools (Prometheus/Grafana, Nagios, Zabbix)
Understanding of hardware components (CPUs, NUMA architecture, PCIe, NICs/RDMA)
Good documentation and communication skills
Nice to Have
Experience with HPC/AI infrastructure (InfiniBand, RDMA, GPU clusters)
Experience with configuration management (Ansible, Puppet)
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