Senior HPC Systems Engineer

kaust (king abdullah university of science and technology); Saudi Arabia; On-site; SAR 360,000 - 600,000; Full time

Job summary

KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory (KSL) seeks a Senior HPC Systems Administrator to oversee a 600-node HPC cluster, high-performance storage, InfiniBand and Ethernet networks, and day-to-day operations supporting researchers across computational science, engineering, big data and AI/ML workloads.

You will install and manage HPC subsystems, deploy Slurm, handle security, performance tuning, and work closely with faculty, application teams, and vendors to ensure reliable, scalable research computing

Qualifications

• Five years of experience supporting large scale computing platforms and related subsystems.
• Experience troubleshooting complex hardware issues and documenting root cause analysis.
• Experience managing parallel storage systems (Lustre, GPFS, Weka, Vast, or similar).
• Experience benchmarking HPC system components (CPU, memory, InfiniBand, storage).
• Experience administering workload managers/schedulers (Slurm, LSF, or PBS). Strong Linux system administration experience (RHEL, Rocky Linux, or CentOS).
• Experience with configuration management tools such as Ansible or Puppet.
• Ability to coordinate with researchers, application support teams, and vendors to resolve complex issues and drive them to closure.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and container orchestration platforms would be desirable

Responsibilities

• Provide timely user support via multiple channels while maintaining high service standards.
• Install, configure, and manage HPC subsystems including compute nodes, storage, InfiniBand and Ethernet.
• Deploy and manage cluster management software, monitoring tools, and supporting services for HPC clusters.
• Install and administer Slurm, manage QOS policies, accounts, and automation scripts.
• Develop automation scripts in Bash and Python to streamline tasks.
• Deploy and manage container environments for HPC workloads.
• Benchmark HPC components to ensure optimal performance and identify tuning opportunities.
• Enforce security best practices including node hardening and kernel patching.
• Manage parallel file systems with performance tuning and capacity planning.
• Support research activities and collaborate with researchers, application teams and industry partners.
• Develop software tools and utilities to support research projects on cluster systems.
• Drive proof-of-concept projects and technology evaluations end-to-end.
• Coordinate with vendors to resolve issues promptly and maintain documentation.

Skills

Linux system administration

HPC environment

Slurm workload manager

Python

Bash

Ansible

Puppet

Docker

Singularity/Apptainer

Kubernetes

InfiniBand networking

GPU/CPU hardware troubleshooting

Performance benchmarking

Parallel file systems (Lustre/GPFS...)

Documentation & training

Education

Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science/engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent

Tools

Ansible

Puppet

Slurm

Docker

Singularity/Apptainer

Kubernetes

Job description

KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory (KSL) seeks a Senior HPC Systems Administrator to oversee a 600-node HPC cluster, high-performance storage, InfiniBand and Ethernet networks, and day-to-day operations supporting researchers across computational science, engineering, big data and AI/ML workloads.

You will install and manage HPC subsystems, deploy Slurm, handle security, performance tuning, and work closely with faculty, application teams, and vendors to ensure reliable, scalable research computing