IT Architect

IT Architect wanted. Meet Karel first.

CERIT-SC · Masaryk University, Brno · part of e-INFRA CZ, the national e-infrastructure for research.

“I am Karel, Guardian and Overwatcher of the cluster. My watch never ends. A reserved accelerator that does no work is a candle lit in an empty room. The dullest ritual is often the load-bearing wall. The wheel turns. The log is closed; the log is never closed. “

That's Karel. He's an AI agent we built, and he writes like a monk keeping vigil over a datacenter.

Every morning Karel files a report: which pods are healthy, which GPUs sit idle, which tickets are aging, where resources are quietly bleeding away. Hand him a git repo and he'll build the image, deploy it to Kubernetes, and loop until the whole thing actually works. He watches over protein folding and earthquake detection, genomics pipelines and NLP courses, security dashboards and databases — a whole small civilization of science, running on one platform.

Karel is very good. He is also completely outnumbered. He can see 512 orphaned services and a CronJob that's been piling up since June; he can't yet reach out and fix them.

That's where you come in.

The job, honestly

We're looking for an IT Architect to design the next generation of what Karel started: a platform that increasingly runs, heals, and understands itself. You won't be babysitting YAML at 3 a.m.; you'll be designing the architecture and the agents on top of it that make human babysitting obsolete.

Tired of DevOps? Good. Automate it into oblivion and take credit for the design.

You'll own the big picture of a national research platform: a multi-cluster Kubernetes estate (from a GPU-dense public cluster to a geo-distributed HA setup across three Brno sites), petabytes of fast storage, and the freedom to decide where it all goes next.

What actually runs here

We're a national research e-infrastructure — the experimental arm of e-INFRA CZ, with a “disruptive use of technology” mission written into our charter. A few things that live on our machines:

A stable of frontier open models, on our own iron. Not one trophy model — a fleet running side by side: DeepSeek V4 Pro (1.6T), Kimi K2.7 (1.1T), GLM-5.2 (~0.8T), and more. Sovereign inference for researchers whose data can't go to Big Tech: genomes, medical records, unpublished science.

Software we build, not just host. Like Foldify — our own web app that puts AlphaFold 3, AlphaFold 2, ColabFold, OmegaFold, and ESMFold behind one clean interface, folds proteins in the browser, compares the results side by side, and asks nobody to log in. Real tools, freely available, used by real labs.

The weird and wonderful. GPU-accelerated remote desktops streamed to a browser. Petabyte Ceph and S3 object storage tuned for high availability. Bioinformatics workflows, power-draw measurement, a docs chatbot that actually reads the docs. If a technology is interesting and useful, we're probably already running it in production and blogging about what broke.

Environments we build for the hard cases. Like SensitiveCloud — our certified secure enclave (built around standards such as ISO 27000) where models and pipelines meet sensitive medical and genomic data, and “move fast” has to coexist with “must never leak.”

AI is the loud tenant. It is not the whole building.

Where this plugs in

We're not a server room in Brno that happens to be large. We're wired into the European research fabric: ELIXIR, the European Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI), EGI, and we operate an EOSC node. Architecture you design here becomes part of a continent's research nervous system. And we are not alone, being part of e-INFRA CZ, we intensively collaborate with CESNET and national supercomputing center IT4Innovations; there is a huge opportunity to share our results with them.

You might be our person if…

• You've built or run serious distributed systems and have opinions about them.
• Kubernetes doesn't scare you, and “the storage fabric is doing something weird” sounds like a good afternoon.
• You're curious about agents, inference, and self-operating infrastructure — and want to build that, not just read about it.
• You can talk to an engineer about eBPF and to a biologist about their data, in the same afternoon.
• You'd rather architect something that accelerates science than optimize ad clicks.
• You're happy to show up in person because some architecture design is still best sketched on a whiteboard in the office in Brno.
• Czech language proficiency at a communicative level and university degree are required.

No certification bingo. Curiosity and a track record of good calls are the whole checklist.

What's in it for you

• Do what you enjoy. Find the part of this that lights you up — agents, model serving, storage, security — and build your role around it. We hand out hard problems, not tickets.
• Toys with a purpose. GPU fleets, DGX-class systems, petabytes of storage — and the mandate to decide how they're used. When researchers publish a breakthrough, your platform is in the acknowledgements.
• Academic freedom, real flexibility. Flexible working hours, conference travel, room to publish, teach, or supervise a thesis. Nobody counts your badge swipes.
• A small, sharp team at Masaryk University's Institute of Computer Science that treats “that's impossible” as a project proposal.
• Brno. One of Europe's best-kept-secret tech cities. Great coffee, short commutes, a real life after work.
• Full-time contract.
• Benefits package: 6 weeks of paid holiday, financial contribution to meals and kindergarten/pension scheme, language courses and sports activities organized by the university, Multisport card, mental health care

Sounds like you?

Send us your CV via the online application and a few lines about the coolest system you´ve ever built – or the first thing you´d have Karl´s successor do. If it clicks, we'll invite you over for coffee and a whiteboard. Karel will probably mention you u in a report.

We run the machines behind the science.

Information about the recruitment process

We are committed to equal opportunities. Every applicant is considered solely on the baisis of their qualifications, experience and potential, regardless of age, gender, social background, disability, or any other personal characteristic.