Research User Computing Lead📣 Job Ad

About the Role

KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) is seeking a Research User Computing Lead to join its team in Thuwal, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. This full-time position involves providing hands-on technical leadership for the university's Linux scientific workstation platform, ensuring its architecture, provisioning, configuration, automation, security, and lifecycle management effectively support research and teaching activities. The role requires 5-10 years of relevant experience.

Platform Leadership and Scope

The primary focus of this role is to ensure high-performance Linux workstations and remote workstation services meet the needs of faculty, researchers, and students. The Lead will also supervise and provide technical direction to engineers supporting Windows and macOS end-user computing, ensuring consistent and reliable service delivery across all platforms within the wider fleet.

Key Responsibilities

• Set the architecture and technical direction for KAUST’s Linux scientific workstation fleet, including configuration management, provisioning, inventory, patching, access control, security, and lifecycle management.
• Establish infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, automation, and engineering standards for the Linux platform team, and provide technical direction for the Windows and macOS endpoint platforms.
• 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 faculty, researchers, students, and teaching users.
• Oversee platform operations, including bare-metal and virtual provisioning, patch orchestration, inventory, drift detection, observability, reliability, and service continuity for active research users.
• Own the security and compliance posture of the workstation fleet, including host hardening, secrets management, audit logging, compliance baselines, and alignment with frameworks such as NIST 800-171 and CIS Benchmarks.
• Define hardware standards, refresh cycles, model validation, driver compatibility, firmware and BIOS automation, and lifecycle plans while balancing research priorities, budget constraints, and user disruption.

Team Leadership and Collaboration

• Lead, mentor, supervise, and develop the Linux workstation platform team, including Windows and macOS engineers, ensuring clear roles, objectives, performance expectations, 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, manage expectations, and translate research and teaching needs into sustainable platform capabilities.
• 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, investment needs, and service improvements.

Required Experience

Candidates for this full-time position should possess 5-10 years of experience in a relevant technical leadership role, particularly with Linux scientific workstation platforms and broader end-user computing environments. The ability to perform other applicable tasks and duties assigned within the realm of the employee’s knowledge, skills, and abilities is also expected.

Work Location

This role is based at the KAUST campus in Thuwal, Makkah, Saudi Arabia.