Research User Computing Lead📣 Job Ad

About the Role at KAUST

The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is seeking a Research User Computing Lead. This full-time position provides hands-on technical leadership for KAUST’s Linux scientific workstation platform, overseeing its architecture, provisioning, configuration, automation, security, and lifecycle management. The role ensures that high-performance Linux workstations and remote workstation services effectively support faculty, researchers, and students across research and teaching activities. While the primary focus is Linux, the Lead also supervises and provides technical direction to Windows and macOS engineers supporting the wider end-user computing fleet, ensuring alignment, consistency, and reliable service delivery across platforms.

Platform Leadership and Strategy

The Research User Computing Lead is responsible for defining the strategic direction and technical standards for the workstation fleet. Key responsibilities include:

• Setting the architecture and technical direction for KAUST’s Linux scientific workstation fleet, encompassing configuration management, provisioning, inventory, patching, access control, security, and lifecycle management.
• Establishing infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, automation, and engineering standards for the Linux platform team, and providing technical direction for the Windows and macOS endpoint platforms.
• Leading and documenting build-vs-buy and tooling decisions for provisioning, configuration management, secrets management, observability, and fleet operations, including rationale, risks, and tradeoffs.
• Owning the design and continuous improvement of physical and remote scientific workstation platforms, ensuring secure, high-performance access for faculty, researchers, students, and teaching users.

Operational Oversight and Security Compliance

• Overseeing platform operations, including bare-metal and virtual provisioning, patch orchestration, inventory, drift detection, observability, reliability, and service continuity for active research users.
• Owning 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.
• Defining 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

• Leading, mentoring, supervising, and developing the Linux workstation platform team, including Windows and macOS engineers, ensuring clear roles, objectives, performance expectations, and shared engineering practices.
• Serving as the senior technical escalation point for complex platform, provisioning, access-control, hardware, and cross-platform endpoint issues.
• Working 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.
• Partnering with network, security, IAM, storage, and advanced computing teams to deliver integrated, secure, and compliant platform services.
• Providing 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 role should possess 0-1 years of relevant experience.

Additional Duties

The successful candidate will also perform other applicable tasks and duties assigned within the realm of their knowledge, skills, and abilities in the field of the position.