@dapz I work in HPC. You have a classic workflow there. I hope I can be of some help. Maybe not!
You could only submit jobs directly from your laptop if the laptop is registered as a submit node in your batch system. ie the cluster will only ‘recognize’ certain hosts as valid hosts to run jobs for. Also there is the problem of synchronising userids. Your numeric UID on your laptop probably is not the same as that on the cluster.
(True - you could write a ‘wrapper script’ which would ssh into the cluster frontend and submit the jobs)
(True - the UID problem is fixable, by using Samba or Centrify or sssd)
You do not say what OS is running on your laptop.
To help with the ‘transfer CSV files back and forth’ part of the workflow there are utilities available.
For Windows I cannot recommend MobaXTerm highly enough https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
The Graphical SFT Browser is what you are looking for.
Oh, and you should be able to mount the storage from the HPC cluster directly as either a Samba share or an NFS share (Windows comes with NFS these days)
If not you have ssh available - so can mount as an ssh filesystem. Message me off list and I can help.
Can you say which OS on the laptop please?