HPC Scientific Software Director

Research Computing is seeking an HPC Scientific Software Director who will be the technical and strategic lead for the Research Computing software engineering organization, responsible for architecting, developing, and maintaining the software ecosystem that powers Johns Hopkins University's high-performance and AI computing environments. The role guides a team of HPC software engineers in building scalable, reproducible, and researcher-friendly platforms for scientific computation, workflow automation, data processing, and AI/ML acceleration. While titled as a director, the position is deeply hands-on: the director remains an active subject-matter expert in HPC frameworks, distributed computing, AI-accelerated software stacks, and large-scale workflow orchestration. The role supports faculty, research staff, and internal engineering teams by providing senior-level technical leadership, setting software strategy, and ensuring robust operational practices across a diverse portfolio of research-focused services.

Job Scope and Complexity

The scope of authority of the IT Director position encompasses one of the following:

• One or more major and highly complex/technical IT functions (e.g., networking, telecommunications, applications, Web services, etc.) that significantly impact operations and support the entire university, health system, or both
• All IT functions of a large school/division of the university and health system that require a diverse and highly complex IT environment involving several highly technical functions, e.g., complex application development, networking, systems, etc.
• Typically has responsibility for a multi-million-dollar budget including both capital and operating expenses. Technology and business decisions made within this organization are highly complex and must take into account the various base of products and services supported across the organization in order to ensure appropriate integration. Typically has a large staff of direct and indirect reports of managers and staff of 20 or more.

(Throughout this job description, "organization" refers to the boundaries of responsibility defined by this scope.)

Specific Duties & Responsibilities

• The responsibilities listed below are typical examples of the work performed by this position.
• Not all duties assigned to this position are included, nor is it expected that everyone in this position will be assigned every job responsibility.

Strategic Planning & Controlling

• As a member of a senior management team, contributes or leads strategic and tactical planning to achieve organizational goals by prioritizing initiatives and coordinating the evaluation, deployment, and management of current and future technologies.
• Develop technology solutions to anticipate the organization's needs, be cost-effective, reliable and compatible with existing and emerging technologies.
• Anticipate change and be agile to respond when technology requirements emerge and evolve.
• Based on understanding of organizational goals, mission, and culture, assess impact and effectiveness of technology to ensure it supports the organization's needs.
• Provide input to, and is has responsibility for, ongoing operations, budgets, a multi-year budget forecast and both strategic and operational planning.
• Balance available personnel and funding resources to support meeting operational and strategic imperatives. Recognizes situations that present themselves and takes action with leadership to address significant issues.
• Work with constituents in conjunction with other IT leaders to interpret customer business needs and makes recommendations for strategic investments in technology, applications, business process, personnel, etc. that meets the agreed upon goals of the organization.
• Provide guidance for the development of technology related policies and procedures and represents IT on business-driven policy committees within and outside of Hopkins.
• Ensure that applicable Hopkins policies, practices, regulatory requirements are addressed and followed within his/her area of responsibility.

Relationship Management

• Represent senior organizational leadership, often with delegated authority, in meetings both within and outside of Hopkins.
• Represent the interest of the organization at industry, state and federal meetings to ensure that the best interests of the organization are considered.
• Manage the customer relationship and satisfaction as well as adherence to the contractual obligations.
• Create and promote a culture of excellent customer service.
• Facilitate and influence organizational strategic initiatives to achieve mission and organizational goals.
• Maintain relationships with strategic technology vendors for the organization.

Project/Product Responsibility

• Has direct responsibility for the design, development, and application of technical solutions that satisfy customer needs and are essential to the organization's ongoing operations.
• Ensure continuous delivery of information technology support and services through direct management of service level agreements.

Staff Management

• Develop and implement an effective and efficient organizational structure that, within the bounds of its responsibilities, supports the ongoing operations of the organization.
• Recruit, develop, retain, and organize staff.
• Perform other related duties as requested.

In Addition to the Duties Described Above

• Lead the software engineering team in building scalable, reproducible, and automated HPC and AI software environments.
• Architect the software stack across multiple clusters, including compilers, libraries, scientific applications, AI/ML frameworks, containers, modules, and workflow orchestration systems.
• Oversee the development and maintenance of automation systems for software deployment, configuration management, CI/CD, and environment lifecycle processes.
• Partner with researchers and domain experts to optimize applications for CPU/GPU architectures, parallel execution, and distributed training or simulation workloads.
• Ensure high reliability of research workflows through robust monitoring, logging, and performance analysis systems.
• Guide the integration of emerging technologies—new GPU platforms, distributed compute frameworks, data processing engines—into production environments.
• Establish coding standards, documentation practices, and reproducibility guidelines for software delivered by the team.
• Lead strategic planning for the software ecosystem, defining technical roadmaps aligned with institutional research priorities.
• Collaborate with systems engineering teams to ensure software and hardware designs evolve cohesively.
• Manage team capacity, mentorship, project planning, vendor engagements, and cross-functional initiatives.
• Serve as the senior technical authority for software-related incidents, upgrades, and performance challenges.
• Foster a culture of innovation, experimentation, and high-quality engineering within the Research Computing software organization.

Supervisory Responsibility

This role provides direct supervision and strategic oversight for the Research Computing software engineering team, including

• Sr. HPC Software Engineers
• Sr. Scientific Software Engineers
• HPC Software Engineers
• Application and User Support Specialists

Additionally collaborates closely with

• IT Manager, Research Computing
• IT Architect, Research Computing
• HPC Systems Engineering leadership
• Faculty and computational research groups

• Bachelor's Degree.
• Ten years of progressively responsible IT management experience including five years of management/supervisory experience.
• Additional education may substitute for required experience and additional related experience may substitute for required education beyond a high school diploma/graduation equivalent, to the extent permitted by the JHU equivalency formula.

• Ten plus years of experience in HPC, large-scale software engineering, or research computing, including hands-on development of distributed or parallelized scientific applications, workflow automation platforms, or AI/ML tooling.
• Five plus years of technical leadership experience, including leading software engineering teams, setting technical direction, and managing complex, multi-phase R&D or infrastructure projects.
• Deep proficiency in Python, C/C++, Go, Rust, or equivalent languages, with experience optimizing code for parallel, multi-node, or GPU-accelerated execution.
• Expertise with HPC and AI software stacks including MPI, CUDA, OpenMP, ROCm, AI/ML frameworks, and distributed computing libraries (Dask, Ray, Horovod).
• Strong experience designing, deploying, and maintaining reproducible research environments using Spack, Lmod, Apptainer/Singularity, and containerized workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to architect CI/CD pipelines, software lifecycle processes, and automation frameworks for large-scale research software deployments.
• Familiarity with workflow engines (Nextflow, Snakemake), data pipelines, and software systems supporting large-volume analytics and scientific simulation at scale.
• Proven success building and maintaining collaborative relationships with faculty and research groups, translating scientific requirements into actionable engineering plans.
• Strong communication and documentation skills, with the ability to lead technical initiatives while mentoring staff and fostering a culture of quality, reproducibility, and innovation.
• Experience contributing to strategic planning, budgeting, procurement, and lifecycle management for research software infrastructure.

Classified Title: IT Director 
Job Posting Title (Working Title): HPC Scientific Software Director ( Research Computing)   
Role/Level/Range: L/05/LH  
Starting Salary Range: $127,300 - $223,000 Annually (Commensurate w/exp.) 
Employee group: Full Time 
Schedule: Mon-Fri 8:30am-5:00pm 
FLSA Status: Exempt 
Location: Mount Washington Campus  
Department name: Research Computing  
Personnel area: University Administration