Senior HPC Systems Administrator

About the role

We are looking for a highly motivated Senior HPC Systems Administrator to join the KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory. The role involves managing a large HPC cluster of approximately 600 CPU and GPU nodes, storage systems, and high‑speed InfiniBand and Ethernet networks, while providing day‑to‑day support to researchers across computational science, engineering, big data analysis, and AI/ML workloads.

Key responsibilities

• Provide timely user support via phone, walk‑in, email and ticketing system while maintaining high service standards.
• Install, configure and manage compute nodes, high‑performance storage, InfiniBand, Ethernet and configuration‑management tools such as Ansible and Puppet.
• Deploy and maintain cluster management software, monitoring tools and supporting services.
• Administer the Slurm workload manager, including QOS policies, accounts, accounting and automation scripts (Python, C++).
• Develop Bash and Python automation scripts to streamline system administration tasks.
• Deploy and manage container environments (Singularity/Apptainer, Docker) for HPC workloads.
• Benchmark CPU, memory, InfiniBand and storage components and tune performance.
• Enforce security best practices, node hardening and kernel patching.
• Manage parallel file systems (Lustre, GPFS, Weka, Vast) with performance tuning and capacity planning.
• Collaborate with faculty, researchers and industrial partners to support computational projects.
• Coordinate with vendors and third‑party providers to resolve issues.
• Develop and maintain user documentation, SOPs and training materials.

Required profile

• Strong experience supporting users in computational science, engineering, data analysis and AI/ML environments.
• Proven expertise in Linux system administration (RHEL, Rocky Linux or CentOS) for large‑scale clusters.
• Ability to work independently and as part of a multidisciplinary team.
• Excellent problem‑solving skills and a commitment to continuous learning.

Required skills

• Linux (RHEL, Rocky Linux, CentOS)
• Ansible
• Puppet
• Slurm workload manager
• Python
• C++
• Bash scripting
• Singularity / Apptainer
• Docker
• InfiniBand and Ethernet networking
• HPC storage systems
• Lustre, GPFS, Weka, Vast file systems
• Monitoring and benchmarking tools