Computational Science Specialist

Are you passionate about using advanced computing technologies to accelerate scientific discovery? Join the College of Sciences Information Technology (COS IT) team and help power groundbreaking research across NC State University.

As a Computational Science Specialist, you will collaborate with faculty, researchers, and students to advance innovative research through high-performance computing, bioinformatics, cloud technologies, and advanced data analysis. This role offers a unique opportunity to bridge technology and science by enabling cutting-edge research projects while supporting the next generation of computational researchers.

From bioinformatics and data visualization to high-performance computing and cloud-based research environments, you will help researchers solve complex scientific challenges and contribute to a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning.

The Computational Science Specialist plays a critical role in advancing cutting-edge research across NC State by helping researchers deploy, optimize, and scale computational workloads on NC State's high-performance computing (HPC) resources, national supercomputing centers, and commercial cloud platforms. Working closely with faculty, researchers, and graduate students, this position provides ongoing scientific computing support while serving as a key member of the Sciences IT team, reporting to the Assistant Director of Information Technology.

The successful candidate will provide bioinformatics computing expertise to the research community, supporting the development and optimization of computational pipelines, software installation and management, database and website development, and scientific data analysis and visualization. Research projects may involve a broad range of biological and computational data types, including next-generation sequencing (NGS), genomic, and phenotypic datasets. Computing activities may take place on NC State HPC resources, College computing infrastructure, the Bioinformatics Research Center (BRC), national supercomputing facilities, or cloud-based environments.

This role will maintain and support scientific software, workflows, and containerized applications using technologies such as Docker and Apptainer (Singularity). Responsibilities include installing and maintaining software within HPC environments, developing and managing research databases, creating technical documentation, and helping research teams implement reproducible and scalable computational workflows.

The Computational Science Specialist will also collaborate with researchers to develop scientific analysis and visualization solutions for complex datasets, providing example code, templates, and best practices. Opportunities may include supporting the development of interactive data applications using frameworks such as Shiny.

This position develops and delivers customized training programs, workshops, and technical documentation to enhance computational skills among graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty, and research staff. A strong commitment to education and research enablement is essential.

In addition, the position assists faculty with developing budgets, proposals, and resource requests to support access to HPC infrastructure and advanced computing resources for research initiatives.