About KAUST and the Role

KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) is seeking a Research User Computing Lead. This full-time role provides hands-on technical leadership for the university’s Linux scientific workstation platform. The Lead is responsible for the architecture, provisioning, configuration, automation, security, and lifecycle management of these critical systems, ensuring high-performance support for faculty, researchers, and students across research and teaching activities.

Technical Leadership and Platform Strategy

The Research User Computing Lead sets the technical direction and architecture for KAUST’s Linux scientific workstation fleet. This includes establishing configuration management, provisioning, inventory, patching, access control, security, and lifecycle management strategies. The role also involves defining infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, automation, and engineering standards for the Linux platform team, while providing technical direction for Windows and macOS endpoint platforms supported by the team.

• Lead and document build-vs-buy and tooling decisions for provisioning, configuration management, secrets management, observability, and fleet operations, including rationale, risks, and tradeoffs.
• Own the design and continuous improvement of physical and remote scientific workstation platforms, ensuring secure, high-performance access for all users.

Platform Operations and Security

This position oversees comprehensive platform operations, ensuring reliability and service continuity for active research users. A core responsibility is to own the security and compliance posture of the workstation fleet, aligning with frameworks such as NIST 800-171 and CIS Benchmarks.

• Oversee bare-metal and virtual provisioning, patch orchestration, inventory, drift detection, observability, and reliability.
• Manage host hardening, secrets management, audit logging, and compliance baselines for the workstation fleet.

Hardware Lifecycle and Standards

The Lead defines hardware standards and manages the lifecycle of workstation equipment. This involves balancing research priorities, budget constraints, and user disruption to ensure optimal performance and longevity of the fleet.

• Define hardware standards, refresh cycles, model validation, driver compatibility, and firmware/BIOS automation.
• Develop and implement lifecycle plans for all workstation hardware.

Team Management and Stakeholder Engagement

The Research User Computing Lead is responsible for the development and guidance of the workstation platform team, including Windows and macOS engineers. This role also involves extensive collaboration with various internal and external stakeholders to translate research and teaching needs into sustainable platform capabilities.

• Lead, mentor, supervise, and develop the Linux workstation platform team, ensuring clear roles, objectives, and shared engineering practices.
• Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex platform, provisioning, access-control, hardware, and cross-platform endpoint issues.
• Work directly with faculty, researchers, students, vendors, and internal IT teams to understand requirements and manage expectations.
• Partner with network, security, IAM, storage, and advanced computing teams to deliver integrated, secure, and compliant platform services.
• Provide regular updates and recommendations to senior IT leadership on platform direction, risks, lifecycle planning, and investment needs.
• Perform other applicable tasks and duties assigned within the realm of the employee’s knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Work Type

This is a full-time position at KAUST, contributing to the critical infrastructure supporting advanced scientific research and education.