HPC Senior Systems Administrator

About the role

KAUST's Supercomputing Laboratory is looking for a highly motivated Senior HPC Systems Administrator to manage a large-scale HPC cluster. You will support researchers across computational science, engineering, big data, and AI/ML by ensuring the reliability and performance of compute, storage, and network resources.

Key responsibilities

• Provide prompt user support via phone, walk‑in, email and ticketing system while maintaining high service standards.
• Install, configure, and maintain compute nodes, high‑performance storage, InfiniBand and Ethernet networks, and configuration‑management tools such as Ansible and Puppet.
• Deploy and manage cluster management software, monitoring tools, and services, including Slurm workload manager.
• Develop and maintain automation scripts in Bash and Python for system administration tasks.
• Manage container environments (Singularity/Apptainer, Docker) for HPC workloads.
• Benchmark and tune CPU, memory, network, and storage components for optimal performance.
• Enforce security best practices, node hardening, and kernel patching.
• Administer parallel file systems (Lustre, GPFS, Weka, Vast) with capacity planning and performance tuning.
• Collaborate with faculty, researchers, and industrial partners to support research projects and drive proof‑of‑concept initiatives.

Required profile

• Minimum 5 years of experience administering large HPC clusters.
• Strong background in Linux system administration and networking.
• Proven ability to work independently and provide excellent user support.
• Experience collaborating with scientific users and application teams.

Required skills

• HPC storage systems
• InfiniBand
• Ethernet networks
• Vast
• MPI
• Lustre
• Slurm workload manager
• Singularity / Apptainer
• OpenACC
• OpenMP
• Bash
• Weka
• CUDA
• Docker
• Ansible
• GPFS
• Puppet
• Python