AI Specialist – HPC

Location: Houston, United States of America

Viridien (www.viridiengroup.com) is an advanced technology, digital and Earth data company that pushes the boundaries of science for a more prosperous and sustainable future. With our ingenuity, drive and deep curiosity we discover new insights, innovations, and solutions that efficiently and responsibly resolve complex natural resource, digital, energy transition and infrastructure challenges.

Job Details

The Role

You will drive AI projects within HPC from initial framing through delivery. Your job is to find where the pain points are – in reliability, throughput, scheduling, data movement, or operational inefficiency – and deliver AI tools and platforms that make our HPC environment more stable and efficient. Our clients benefit downstream from these improvements.

As an individual contributor, you will own a portfolio of AI initiatives targeted at where AI can most improve HPC and keep a clear view of how these improvements translate into client outcomes.

The role suits someone who can move between a conversation with an HPC operator about recurring failures, a discussion with platform engineers about scheduler and telemetry data, and a review of model architecture trade-offs.

Key Responsibilities

• Driving AI projects end to end: problem framing, scoping, prioritization, delivery tracking, and measuring outcomes
• Working closely with HPC teams to identify where data and AI can improve the efficiency of both HPC compute and the teams that operate it
• Identifying the HPC data that indicates quality and success – scheduler, telemetry, storage, job, and application metrics – and assessing its readiness for AI use
• Evaluating AI architectures and approaches – machine learning, LLMs, retrieval, agents – against the problem at hand and making clear recommendations
• Delivering AI tools that improve HPC operations in areas like anomaly detection, failure prediction, job diagnostics, and agentic assistants
• Prioritizing and framing AI tools by their impact on HPC – stability, throughput, and utilization – and ultimately on faster, more reliable delivery of results to clients
• Working with platform, data, and infrastructure teams to move prototypes into supported, operational capabilities
• Communicating progress, results, and trade-offs to stakeholders at all levels

What We’re Looking For

The successful candidate will be a credible bridge between AI and HPC, trusted by the engineers and operators whose work you aim to improve, with strong communication and structured problem-solving skills. You will be comfortable with ambiguity, able to turn a loosely defined problem into a clear plan and motivated by delivering results people actually use.

Required

• A demonstrable track-record of managing or leading AI, ML, or data projects from concept through delivery
• A working understanding of modern AI architectures – ML pipelines, LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, agents – sufficient to assess feasibility and challenge technical proposals
• Experience working with operational or infrastructure data (telemetry, logs, metrics, job accounting) and a clear sense of what it can and cannot tell you
• Experience in a client-facing technical role, internal or external, translating customer needs into delivered solutions
• An understanding of HPC or large-scale distributed compute environments – how workloads are scheduled, run, and measured, and what drives their stability and efficiency
• Strong written and verbal communication, with examples of influencing decisions without formal authority

Preferred

• Experience in seismic processing across CPU and GPU workloads at petaflop scale
• Familiarity with Slurm or other HPC workload managers
• Hands-on Python and data tooling for prototyping and analysis
• Familiarity with MCP, agent frameworks, or model-serving platforms
• Formal project management or Agile delivery experience

Houston Benefits

• 401k Retirement Plan - when you contribute up to 5%, not only will we match that, but we will also add an additional 2%
• Free on-site fitness centre offering group exercise classes
• Short-term disability and long-term disability coverage at no cost to you
• Parental Leave Program allowing mothers and fathers to take time off from work for childbirth, adoption and to bond with your new child
• Pet Insurance – options to meet every budget
• Wellness Program – resources provided to support your personal wellness and participation in activities can earn you $65 quarterly.

Our Hiring Process

At Viridien, we are committed to delivering a respectful, inclusive, and transparent recruitment experience.

Due to the high volume of applications we receive, we may not be able to provide individual feedback to every applicant. Only candidates whose qualifications closely match the role criteria will be contacted for an interview. We do, however, aim to share personalized feedback with those who progress to the first round of interviews and beyond.

We are also dedicated to ensuring that our hiring process accessible to all. If you require any reasonable adjustments to fully participate in the application or interview stages, please don’t hesitate to contact your recruiter directly.

We see things differently. Diversity fuels our innovation, we value the unique ways in which we differ, and we are committed to equal employment opportunities for all professionals.