High-Performance Computing (HPC) Security SME - Contract (Freelance)

Job Title: High-Performance Computing (HPC) Security SME

Employment Type: Contract (Freelance)

Start Date: ASAP

Duration: 12 Months+

Location: United Kingdom

Rate: DOE

Security Clearance: Active DV or SC clearance (DV-Clearance strongly preferred).

Sector: Defence (Mission Critical Secure HPC Programme)

The Opportunity:

Our UK Defence Client is delivering a flagship secure HPC programme supporting next-generation classified simulations, AI-driven defence analytics, and zero-trust super-computing clusters for the Intelligence Community and allied partners.

This is a DV-Cleared preferred position, multi-year contract with guaranteed extensions and direct impact on national security outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

Architect and harden secure HPC clusters (Slurm, PBS Pro, GPU-accelerated environments) for classified workloads.
Perform cyber risk assessments and compliance mapping (NCSC CAF, JSP 440, NIST 800-53, DEF STAN).
Implement zero-trust security controls across HPC fabrics (SELinux, NVIDIA security stack, OPA policies).
Integrate real-time threat detection via SIEM (Splunk/Elastic) with HPC telemetry and anomaly hunting.
Lead Cyber Security exercises adapted to HPC (MITRE ATT&CK for defence systems).
Automate secure IaC (Ansible, Terraform) for air-gapped or hybrid HPC deployments.
Support NCSC audits to maintain IL5/IL6 equivalency for sensitive data processing.

Essential Requirements

Active UK DV or SC clearance (DV-Clearance strongly preferred).
5+ years securing HPC systems.
Expert-level knowledge of HPC schedulers, parallel file systems (Lustre, GPFS, BeeGFS), and high-speed interconnects (Infiniband/RoCE).
Relevant certifications: CISSP, CISM, OSCP, or NCSC CCP (Senior Practitioner+).
Threat modelling experience for exascale/GPU workloads in classified environments.

Desirable Skills/Experience

Secure AI/ML pipelines on HPC (PyTorch/TensorFlow + CUDA hardening).
Quantum-resistant cryptography for future HPC roadmap.
Cross-domain/air-gapped solutions (data diodes, guarded transfers).
Containerised HPC (Apptainer/Singularity, Kubernetes GPU operators).
Active contribution to cleared HPC security research or patents.

Next Steps

If interested, please send your most recent to: so that we can discuss more details.

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