Systems Administrator & Compute Support (Part-Time Contractor — San Francisco)

Foresight Institute is hiring a hands-on Systems Administrator to support the technical infrastructure of our San Francisco AI Node — a physical hub where researchers collaborate on AI-driven scientific progress.

Are you a practical, implementation-focused person with an entrepreneurial spirit? At the Node you will help keep our local compute infrastructure running smoothly, support containerized workloads, and troubleshoot issues when they arise. Some work is remote, but you must be available for on-site hardware setup and occasional urgent issues in the Mission, San Francisco.

Role details

Location: San Francisco (Mission District)

Type: Part-time contractor, ad-hoc (2–10 hours/week)

Compensation: per hour (based on experience)

Start: As soon as possible (rolling review)

Application deadline: The role will be filled as soon as possible. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

What you’ll do

• Maintain and troubleshoot UNIX-based GPU compute systems
• Maintain local servers and physical hardware
• Support Docker/containerized research workloads
• Manage NVIDIA drivers, CUDA environments, and multi-user GPU access
• Help onboard research projects and improve pre-existing documentation

Required

• Formal and informal hands-on experience with physical servers or local hardware
• Experience with NVIDIA GPUs (drivers, CUDA, troubleshooting)
• Able to diagnose infrastructure and networking issues
• Based in SF and able to come on-site when needed
• Experience with Docker and Unix-based systems
• Ability to diagnose networking and hardware issues
• Reliable and responsive (typically within 16 hours)

Nice to Have

• Experience with multi-user GPU scheduling (e.g., Slurm, Kubernetes, or similar)
• Familiarity with ML research workflows (PyTorch, JAX, etc.)
• Experience in research or academic compute environments
• Basic security hardening knowledge
• Experience with heterogeneous or mixed-architecture clusters

If you enjoy enabling cutting-edge research by making infrastructure work smoothly, we’d love to hear from you. Apply here.