All credit goes to the ISG group of D-ITET at ETH 
Funny enough renku doesn’t seem to mind the project being on an LFS. Only the home directory.
I filed a bug report: Unable to acquire lock when home directory is mounted with NFS · Issue #3669 · SwissDataScienceCenter/renku-python · GitHub
I also found a workaround:
$ HOME=/scratch/mrawlik renku