Job Description
Position Details
IT Services
Location: University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham UK
Full time starting salary is normally in the range £46,735 to £55,755 with potential progression once in post to £62,728
Grade: 8
Full Time, Permanent
Closing date: 4th August 2025
UK travel may be required for this role
Our offer to you
People are at the heart of what we are and do.
The University of Birmingham is proud to have been a part of the City of Birmingham and the wider region for over 100 years, and we are equally proud to be recognised as a leading global university. We want to attract talented people from across the city and beyond, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success.
We are committed to helping the people who work here to develop through our sector-leading Birmingham Professional programme which provides all professional services staff with development opportunities and the encouragement to reach their full potential. With almost 5,000 professional services jobs in a wide-range of functions in Edgbaston and in our campus in Dubai, there are plenty of opportunities for you to be able to develop your career at the University.
We believe there is no such thing as a typical member of staff and that diversity is a source of strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation, and debate. We warmly welcome people from all backgrounds and are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where diversity is at the heart of who and what we are, and how we work.
Supporting our people to achieve a healthy work/life balance is important both to our employees and to the success of the University and, depending on the role, we offer a variety of flexible working arrangements. We therefore welcome discussions on all forms of flexible working. In addition, you will receive a generous package of benefits including 40 days paid holiday a year, one paid day a year for volunteering, occupational sick pay, and a pension scheme. We also have three high quality subsidised day nurseries.
The University is situated in leafy Edgbaston and there are excellent transport links to our beautiful campus, including main bus routes and a train station on site. On campus we have a state-of-the-art sports centre with pool, shops, places to eat and drink, our own art gallery, museum and botanical gardens.
Find out more about the benefits of working for the University of Birmingham
Background
Over the next decade, our aspiration is to establish Birmingham in the top 50 of the world's leading universities. That's a big aspiration, and high-quality digital services and infrastructure are crucial to achieving it. In recognition of that, a brand-new Digital Strategy combined with significant investments in technology mean this is an exciting time to join IT Services,
‘making IT happen’ at the University of Birmingham.
We want to attract outstanding, inspirational, and talented people, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success. It's our role to ensure that our community has access to accessible, responsive, resilient, and secure systems and support. What we do enables our students, staff, researchers, visitors and partners to confidently and creatively use digital services, technology and data for the benefit of their learning, teaching, research or work.
The culture of IT Services is one of innovation, collaboration, excellence, and inclusivity, and we apply the principles of customer focus and continuous improvement to everything we do. We have an active People and Culture network, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Women in IT group, bi-annual making IT happen awards recognition programme, and a superb Social Committee which arranges regular activities and events.
Department Overview
Advanced Research Computing (ARC) is an award-winning team, based in IT Services, which has earned a national and international profile for delivering high quality, underpinning research computing services.
Within ARC, the Architecture, Infrastructure and Systems (AIS) group is responsible for the design, planning, installation and running of hardware systems and associated services that underpin both University and national services. AIS works in partnership with ARC’s Research Software Group and Research Engagement and Data Group to provide a sector leading environment for computationally and data intensive research, catering for all academic disciplines.
The Group currently operates ‘at-scale’ research storage systems, supercomputing, high-speed networking and private cloud infrastructure and is constantly evolving and growing to get the best advantage from the latest innovation in technology.
Role Summary
The Senior ARC Engineer (Research Systems) is an expert, exercising professional responsibility for key and underpinning infrastructure – with a particular focus on private cloud technologies. They are a senior contributor who takes responsibility for the design and operation of services and works as part of a wider team of specialists providing a broad range of significant specialist services.
The post holder is a senior technical specialist with extensive experience in the area. An expert contributor with a broad knowledge of computing (theoretical and practical) and detailed knowledge in their discipline with operational management responsibility for installed BEAR infrastructure and its supporting services in the data centre.
Main Duties
- Support the technologies underpinning BEAR private-cloud service.
- Support for the wider BEAR infrastructure systems and services (including HPC, Gitlab, data transfer tools, DNS, xcat, Databases, Saltstack and Ansible).
- Proactively monitor systems and services to identify, investigate and manage the resolution of hardware issues or unexpected events. Take the technical lead in the event of major incidents.
- Carry out infrastructure developments, in accordance with the approved programme, maintaining appropriate access to and allocation of resources as well as efficient operation.
- Provide substantial input to the technical specification and to technical discussions with prospective suppliers for major developments.
- Plan and co-ordinate with the wider ARC and service users to minimize disruption.
- Ensure that systems are interconnected correctly and manage underpinning software technologies that support integration of the systems.
- As part of renewal, develop and deploy technical strategies and solutions to maximize the efficiency of operations, reducing the carbon footprint of facilities and the associated energy costs.
- Work with the ARC Leadership Team and Principal Engineers to define the strategy and design of the BEAR infrastructure and services, including working with colleagues in IT Services (e.g. the Network, Identity, Mail and Cybersecurity Teams).
- Build and manage relationships with suppliers both internal and external to support both operations and the development of the infrastructure and its associated services. This will include the partnerships necessary to support collaborative research; on campus, nationally as well as internationally.
- Identify, evaluate and benchmark new systems which may be of potential benefit for BEAR services.
- Originate, source and maintain documentation (CMDB, schematic and operational) both for the systems and services and to underpin the wider service management requirements within the team.
- Build relationships and proactively work with other IT Services teams representing ARC and the needs of the BEAR service.
- Actively manages equality, diversity and inclusion through monitoring and evaluation and actively challenging unacceptable behaviour.
- Supports the University’s sustainability agenda through resource efficient working.
- Any other duties commensurate with the grade.
Required Knowledge, Skills, Qualifications, Experience
- Educated to degree level or equivalent qualification plus substantial work experience in a relevant technical role in a specialist area. Where no equivalent qualification is held a proven track record of extensive and substantial work experience in a series of progressively more demanding and relevant roles will be required.
- Proven technical specialist knowledge and understanding in a relevant technical area (specialists will require advanced technical expertise):
- Substantial experience as a Linux system administrator is essential.
- Proficiency in scripting skills in BASH and Python is essential.
- Experience with one or more of the following technologies: OpenStack, Kubernetes, Podman, Apptainer/Docker is required.
- Experience of using a Linux configuration management tool such as Ansible, saltstack or puppet.
- Experience of managing Ceph, S3 is highly desirable.
- Excellent communications skills - able to document solutions, communicate effectively to peers as well as convey difficult concepts to novice users is essential.
- Experience with SQL databases (MariaDB, and NoSQL databases (MongoDB) is desirable.
- Experience of working with parallel filesystems is desirable.
- An understanding of TCP/IP networking design and operation is desirable.
- Experience with HPC cluster management tools (e.g. XCAT, BrightCM) would be an advantage.
- A commitment to working in structured ways to deliver and support services using the relevant standards, methodologies, best practice and tools e.g. Agile, ITIL, Configuration Management tools, version control system, etc.
- Good customer service skills, ability to engage with researchers and understand research requirements.
- Proven ability to work as part of a team to deliver services.
- Demonstrated capacity to independently solve problems.
- A self-motivated learner with a track record of continually updating skills.
- Excellent organizational skills with an ability to research and plan own work.
- Good broad knowledge of C&IT, including latest technology industry trends.
- Evidence of literacy and numeracy.
- Experience of championing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in own work area.
- Ability to monitor and evaluate the extent to which equality and diversity legislation, policies, procedures are applied.
- Ability to identify issues with the potential to impact on protected groups and take appropriate action.
Informal enquiries to Jon Wakelin, email:
[email protected]View our staff values and behaviours here
We believe there is no such thing as a 'typical' member of University of Birmingham staff and that diversity in its many forms is a strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation and debate at the heart of University life. We are committed to proactively addressing the barriers experienced by some groups in our community and are proud to hold Athena SWAN, Race Equality Charter and Disability Confident accreditations. We have an Equality Diversity and Inclusion Centre that focuses on continuously improving the University as a fair and inclusive place to work where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. We are also committed to sustainability, which is a key part of our strategy. You can find out more about our work to create a fairer university for everyone on our website . 
