What We Do

At the SEI Artificial Intelligence Division, we conduct research in applied artificial intelligence and the engineering questions related to the practical design and implementation of AI technologies and systems. We currently lead a community-wide movement to mature the discipline of AI Engineering for Defense and National Security.

As our government customers adopt AI and machine learning to provide leap-ahead mission capabilities, we

• build real-world, mission-scale AI capabilities through solving practical engineering problems

• discover and define the processes, practices, and tools to support operationalizing AI for robust, secure, scalable, and human-centered mission capabilities

• prepare our customers to be ready for the unique challenges of adopting, deploying, using, and maintaining AI capabilities

• identify and investigate emerging AI and AI-adjacent technologies that are rapidly transforming the technology landscape

Are you creative, curious, energetic, collaborative, technology-focused, and hard-working? Are you interested in making a difference by bringing innovation to government organizations and beyond? Apply to join our team.

Position Summary

As an Associate Infrastructure Engineer on our team, you will maintain and develop a research-oriented lab environment, manage cloud environments, administer the systems to maintain these environments, and embed with researchers to ensure their needs are being met.

As a member of the AI Division team, you will work on leading edge technologies and apply them to important and challenging problems. The work environment is dynamic and flexible, with constant opportunities to develop new skills, learn about new software frameworks and techniques, work on emerging architectures and systems, and make a difference.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology field or a related field of study, with 3 years of applicable experience; or a Master's degree in Information Technology or related field, with 1 year of applicable experience.

• Experience tuning and measuring high performance systems - high-throughput networking, large disk arrays, etc.

• Strong Linux System Administration Experience - RHEL preferred.

• Familiarity with lights out management.

• Experience scripting and automating systems.

• Experience documenting issues and solutions and evaluating enterprise systems.

• Experience working with one or more host management tools (Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc.).

• Experience with virtualization and containers (Docker, VMWare).

• Experience maintaining and evolving an enterprise or research-oriented computer network.

• Hands on experience with switches, firewalls routers, network storage, and virtualized environments.

• Experience supporting cloud compute environments is preferred.

• Experience as a network/system administrator for a networked Linux infrastructure in a professional environment is preferred.

• Experience with high-performance computing technologies is a plus.

• Experience developing policies and best practices is a plus.

• Experience with security auditing is a plus.

• Experience with DFARS compliance is a plus.

Duties

• Subject Matter Expertise: As an associate infrastructure engineer, you will support the AI Division's mission by serving as a subject matter expert on developing, evaluating, and maintaining high-performance IT systems that support our efforts to transition and operationalize research concepts of significant value to the US Government.

• Design, Building, and Maintenance of IT Systems: You will take a hands-on role on teams of software developers, machine learning (ML) researchers, and ML engineers to design, build, and maintain enterprise IT systems. This infrastructure supports delivering capabilities to the US Government building on state-of-the-art research in analytics, data architectures, machine learning, security, and human information interaction. You will collaborate daily with the team to understand, plan, and implement infrastructure practices and changes. You will manage and evolve the heterogeneous high-performance computing cluster. You will deploy distributed computing frameworks. You will contribute technical knowledge and experience to projects that focus on big data, data-intensive scalable computing, and high-performance computing. You will define, implement, and communicate best practices and standards for staff that access AI Division hardware, and you will serve as the primary technical liaison to corporate IT.

• Issue Triage: You will be on the front lines of issues which impact the day-to-day operations of research in the AI space.

• Security Audits: You will collaborate with corporate IT annually to maintain security compliance.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Technical Expertise: You can deal with software and network systems integration at various levels. You have a working knowledge of distributed file systems and clustered frameworks and a deep understanding of networking and hardware support. You have strong hands-on knowledge in the configuration, securing, and troubleshooting of network devices, LAN switching technologies, firewalls, VPNs, routing protocols, Linux/UNIX based network services, network storage and monitoring/maintaining all of these to ensure their continued secure operation is required. You can write scripts in multiple interpreted languages (bash, Python, Perl, Ruby, Go). You can build software from source and create packages.

• Communication and Collaboration: You are an exceptional communicator and can interact collaboratively and diplomatically with immediate team members as well as corporate IT.

• Continuous Learning: You seek out and participate in continuous education, whether formal or informal to ensure leveraging best of breed technologies to meet research objectives.

• Dedication and Motivation: You can meet deadlines while multi-tasking-sometimes under pressure and with shifting priorities. You are self-motivated and can work toward a common vision with little oversight. You can track multiple projects with different requirements in a shared resource environment.

Other Requirements:

• Flexible to travel to various locations within the SEI and CMU community, sponsor sites, conferences, and offsite meetings on occasion. Travel outside of Pittsburgh limited to no more than 5 working days a month.

• You will be subject to a background investigation and must be eligible to obtain and maintain a Department of Defense security clearance.

• Applicants for this position must be currently legally authorized to work for CMU in the United States. CMU will not sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa for this opportunity.