Associate Engineer, Technology II
Posted Sep 28, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Oct 6, 2026
Likely interview questions for this role
Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.
About your past
Tell me about a time you supported a non-technical or semi-technical user through a frustrating issue.
What they are checking: Whether they support researchers patiently and clearly, since the users of this role are scientists rather than engineers.
How do you keep technical documentation useful instead of stale?
What they are checking: Whether they keep documentation current and useful, so other engineers and users can solve problems without asking them every time.
What would you do
A researcher says their pipeline runs on their laptop but fails on the cluster. How do you debug it?
What they are checking: Whether they troubleshoot systematically across environments, checking paths, libraries and resources rather than guessing at random fixes.
A license server for a commercial tool goes down during a busy week. What do you do?
What they are checking: Whether they respond to an outage calmly, restore service quickly and keep users informed while the problem is being fixed.
About the work
Walk me through how you'd install a scientific application like Schrödinger on an HPC cluster so many users can run it.
What they are checking: Whether they can deploy scientific software on a shared cluster so many users can run it reliably and without conflicts.
When would you use a container instead of a module or a source build for scientific software?
What they are checking: Whether they choose between containers, modules and source builds for good reasons, which affects how maintainable the environment is.
How does a job get scheduled and run in Slurm, and what would you check if a user's jobs sit pending?
What they are checking: Whether they understand Slurm scheduling well enough to diagnose stuck jobs, a common and frustrating problem for researchers.
How would you automate software deployment so the next version goes out with less manual work?
What they are checking: Whether they think about automating deployment with CI/CD, so new versions go out reliably without repeated manual steps.
What's different about running scientific workloads on Kubernetes compared with a traditional HPC scheduler?
What they are checking: Whether they understand the trade-offs between Kubernetes and traditional HPC scheduling for scientific work, as research moves toward hybrid setups.
What Linux skills do you use most when supporting software, and give me an example.
What they are checking: Whether they have real, hands-on Linux depth, which is the foundation of supporting scientific software on a cluster.
How do you think about security when installing open-source software in an enterprise research environment?
What they are checking: Whether they consider security when installing open-source software, since research environments still hold sensitive company data.
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Practice this out loudThe full job description
As published by AbbVie.