Senior IBM ESS Storage Support Engineer

The company is a leader in its field, delivering digital and AI-driven solutions specifically for the life sciences and healthcare industries. It provides end-to-end engineering, informatics, and data science services, leveraging scientific and technical expertise to build scalable, secure, and compliant digital solutions. Its core activities include artificial intelligence, scientific informatics, and laboratory informatics, as well as the development of custom laboratory software solutions. The company also focuses on data science and engineering, along with solution design such as building data management infrastructure to support scientific research. In addition, it offers cloud engineering services with expertise in GCP and AWS, and develops high-performance computing (HPC) platforms used for complex tasks such as cell image analysis and molecular docking.

We are seeking a contractor to provide day-to-day remote support for an ageing 4.5 PB IBM ESS storage environment supporting HPC clusters within a data center setting. The engagement is focused on operational support, incident resolution, system health monitoring, filesystem support, and critical escalation coverage outside standard business hours. The IBM ESS Storage Support Engineer will be responsible for the ongoing support and maintenance of the storage environment. This includes monitoring, troubleshooting, break-fix support, routine health checks, and performance tuning of IBM Spectrum Scale / GPFS in an HPC environment. The role also requires participation in weekend on-call support for critical Severity 1 issues.

Small, cross-functional teams where data scientists, engineers, and scientific experts collaborate closely on real-world pharma and biotech problems.
These teams operate in an agile, client-facing setup, combining domain knowledge with AI and software engineering to build production-ready solutions.
Team members benefit from working on meaningful projects like drug discovery while gaining a rare mix of technical and life sciences expertise.
The environment offers fast learning, international exposure, and strong collaboration, though it requires adaptability to changing client needs.

• Interview process that respects people and their time
• Professional and open IT community
• Internal meet-ups and resources for knowledge sharing
• Time for recovery and relaxation
• Bright online and offline events
• Opportunity to become part of our internal volunteer community

Provide day-to-day remote operational support for a 4.5 PB IBM ESS storage environment
Monitor system health, alerts, capacity, and overall storage performance
Investigate, troubleshoot, and resolve storage-related incidents and service issues
Provide break-fix support and coordinate escalations where required
Support IBM Spectrum Scale / GPFS in an HPC environment
Assist with tuning and troubleshooting of parallel filesystem workloads
Carry out routine health checks and preventative maintenance activities
Support SAN-related troubleshooting, including fabric connectivity and multipathing
Participate in weekend on-call support for Severity 1 incidents only
Maintain clear documentation of incidents, resolutions, and operational recommendations

What we expect:

• Proven hands-on experience with IBM ESS storage systems
• Experience supporting IBM Spectrum Scale / GPFS in HPC environments
• Good understanding of parallel filesystem workloads and HPC job patterns
• Experience with SAN environments, including Brocade or Cisco fabrics, zoning, LUN masking, and multipathing
• Strong Linux administration skills, particularly RHEL and SUSE
• Working knowledge of the AIX command line
• Fluent English, both written and spoken
• Availability to work during EST business hours
• Ability to provide weekend on-call support for Severity 1 incidents

Nice to have:

• Experience supporting petabyte-scale storage environments
• Background in data centre or scientific computing environments
• Experience with performance tuning of GPFS / Spectrum Scale
• Familiarity with supporting ageing infrastructure and maintaining operational stability
• Experience in incident management and root cause analysis