Freelance High Performance Computing Engineer Jobs in Massachusetts

When you join the growing BILH team, you're not just taking a job, you’re making a difference in people’s lives.

Reporting directly to the Chief Academic Officer, BILH/BIDMC, the Executive Director, Research Computing & Informatics, provides strategic and operational leadership for research-focused IT services across the BILH system, with a primary emphasis on establishing, expanding, and sustaining a comprehensive High Performance Computing (HPC) program, AI/ML research capabilities and next generation cyber infrastructure for research. The Executive Director will partner closely with the BILH IT System Services Liaison for Research.
The Executive Director serves as a bridge between complex research IT capabilities and the academic community, with a demonstrated ability to communicate technical concepts, risks, and opportunities in clear, accessible terms to non-technical faculty, administrators, and senior leadership. This role partners closely with faculty, research leadership, academic units, and BILH IT System Services to enable data intensive, computational data, and AI-driven research across disciplines.
BILH is establishing a system-wide High-Performance Computing (HPC) Core enabled by a strategic grant from Dell Technologies. The Executive Director will lead the design, deployment, and operation of this enterprise HPC environment and ensure it delivers measurable impact across biomedical research, clinical trials, and AI-enabled healthcare.
This role is responsible for translating a major capital investment in advanced computing into a durable, secure, and investigator-focused capability. The Executive Director will bridge biomedical research, clinical informatics, AI governance, and enterprise IT, with an initial focus on AI-enhanced clinical trial recruitment and large-scale analysis of BILH-wide clinical and research data.
The position is foundational to BILH’s strategy for data-powered precision medicine and will shape how computational resources are accessed, governed, and scaled across the system.
The Executive Director serves as a key architect of the institution’s research computational and AI research strategy, ensuring scalable, secure, and sustainable computing environments that enhance research competitiveness, attract external funding, and accelerate discovery by aligning capabilities with current and future research needs.

Job Description:

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership & Vision

• Develop and lead a comprehensive strategy for research computing, HPC, and AI/ML platforms aligned with institutional research priorities and academic goals.
• Translate institutional research priorities into computing capabilities supporting omics, imaging, clinical data analytics, simulation, and AI/ML workloads.
• Establish a sustainable, scalable ecosystem for advanced computing and AI-enabled research, supporting modeling, simulation, data analytics, and machine learning workloads.
• Advise the Chief Academic Officer and administrative leadership on trends, opportunities, and risks related to research IT, HPC, AI/ML, and cyberinfrastructure.
• Integrate principles of responsible, ethical, and transparent AI into research computing strategy and operations.

HPC Core Leadership & Delivery

• Lead the implementation, operation, and continuous evolution of the HPC Core, ensuring enterprise-grade reliability, scalability, performance, and secure access.

• Manage the HPC Core as a viable and sustainable service for the research community, balancing performance, access, and cost.
• Establish governance, access models, service tiers, and support frameworks for shared HPC and AI/ML resources.
• Promote best practices in research software engineering, reproducibility, workflow automation, and MLOps.

Clinical Trials & AI Enablement

• Drive early HPC and AI/ML use cases that strengthen clinical trial recruitment, including AI-enhanced cohort discovery and analytics.
• Partner with clinical informatics and data teams to support large-scale querying and analysis of enterprise clinical datasets, including millions of patients, encounters, and clinical notes.
• Ensure strict protection of PHI and regulated data through secure computing environments, governance controls, and compliance-aligned architectures.
• Work closely with institutional AI/LLM governance bodies to ensure responsible, ethical, and compliant deployment of advanced analytics and AI workflows.

Research Engagement & Enablement

• Serve as the senior point of contact for investigators, core facilities, and translational research programs seeking advanced computational and AI-enabled support.

• Ensure equitable access to HPC resources for early-stage investigators as well as large, data-intensive research programs.
• Deliver early insights and demonstrable value from biomedical discovery and translational research use cases.
• Support grant competitiveness by documenting HPC and AI/ML capabilities, advising on computational feasibility, and aligning infrastructure with sponsor expectations.
• Establish and lead training and onboarding programs to enable effective researcher access and adoption of HPC and AI platforms.

Architecture, Operations & Security

• Oversee HPC and research computing architecture across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, including GPU-accelerated systems.
• Ensure enterprise-grade operations, including system monitoring, patching, lifecycle management, disaster recovery, performance tuning, and capacity planning.
• Maintain close alignment with BILH IT System Services on facilities, power, cooling, networking, and physical and cyber security of high-value computing assets.
• Promote best practices in research software engineering, reproducibility, workflow automation, and MLOps.
• Oversee AI/ML research platforms, including data pipelines, model training and inference environments, high-performance storage, and research software ecosystems.
• Establish governance, access models, service tiers, and support frameworks for shared HPC and AI/ML resources.
• Promote best practices in research software engineering, reproducibility, workflow automation, and MLOps.

Governance, Strategy & Partnerships

• Contribute to institutional governance related to research computing, data science, and AI strategy.
• Advise senior academic, research, and clinical leadership on trends, risks, and investment opportunities in HPC, AI/ML, and cyberinfrastructure.
• Represent the institution in external initiatives and partnerships, including regional and national efforts such as the Massachusetts AI Hub.
• Engage industry partners and vendors in ways that accelerate research while protecting patient data, institutional interests, and academic independence.

Financial & Team Management

• Manage HPC operating and capital budgets, vendor relationships, refresh cycles, and long-term capacity planning.
• Implement transparent usage, allocation, and cost models that balance sustainability with broad and equitable access.
• Build, mentor, and lead a multidisciplinary HPC and research computing team spanning infrastructure, storage, security, and investigator-facing support.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, service excellence, and continuous learning.
• Oversee AI/ML research platforms, including data pipelines, model training and inference environments, high-performance storage, and research software ecosystems.
• Establish governance, access models, service tiers, and support frameworks for shared HPC and AI/ML resources.

Required Qualifications

• Advanced degree (PhD, MD, or equivalent experience) in a computational, biomedical, engineering, data science, or other data-intensive discipline.
• Leadership experience directing high-performance or large-scale research computing in an academic medical center or comparable environment.
• Demonstrated experience supporting data-intensive biomedical and clinical research and working directly with investigators.
• Strong understanding of secure computing environments for sensitive, regulated, or clinical data (e.g., PHI).
• Proven ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and effectively to non-technical faculty, clinical leaders, and executive stakeholders.
• Demonstrated success leading cross-functional teams and complex, enterprise-scale initiatives.

Desirable Qualifications

• Direct experience of biomedical research activities.
• Direct experience with AI/ML or LLM-based systems applied to clinical or translational research.
• Experience integrating research computing platforms with EMR-adjacent or clinical data systems.
• Track record of contributing to institutional infrastructure strategy or large-scale research initiatives.
• Familiarity with governance models for AI, data access, and enterprise research computing.

The Executive Director must be able to:

• Convert Dell’s in-kind investment into real scientific and clinical impact.
• Navigate the boundary between research computing and clinical data without compromising security or trust.
• Deliver early wins in biomedical research, clinical trial recruitment and AI-enabled analytics while building a long-term, scalable platform.

Pay Range:

$225,000.00 USD - $295,000.00 USD

The pay range listed for this position is the annual base salary range the organization reasonably and in good faith expects to pay for this position at this time. Actual compensation is determined based on several factors, that may include seniority, education, training, relevant experience, relevant certifications, geography of work location, job responsibilities, or other applicable factors permissible by law. 

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