Senior Research Operations Engineer

About us

e-Research (soon to be known as Advanced Research Computing) at King's College London is expanding with the mission to help enable and facilitate computational and data-intensive research across KCL Faculties.

We regularly add to our HPC cluster and Cloud infrastructure, making our environment highly heterogeneous. This means we get to work with a range of hardware, including the latest GPUs (e.g., B200, RTX 6000 Blackwell Pro, H200) and CPU architectures that, even if they increase complexity, generate the kinds of problems we love! 

This role in our Operations Team provides support for the day-to-day running of the infrastructure and services provided by e-Research, as well as specialist assistance across the academic and research lifecycle across the full spectrum of faculties at King's.

Details of the infrastructure and services provided by e-Research are available on https://docs.er.kcl.ac.uk

Early applications are encouraged, as we reserve the right to close the advert early if a high volume of suitable applications is received.

About the role

We encourage attendance to at least two conferences a year and personal development with an allocation of 10% of time dedicated to working on projects or activities that support professional development in a relevant field.

We are particularly looking for applicants who appreciate and can solve complex problems and are ready to step into technical leadership and shape culture.

Experience deploying AI models for practical or specific research purposes and familiarity with concepts such as RAG and MCP is also highly valued.

We also expect the capacity, with mentorship from senior members of the department, to be able to develop high-quality technical consultancy skills translating research requirements into costed funding proposals.

For an informal chat, or any specific questions about the role, please contact stuart.morrison@kcl.ac.uk

About you

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

• Post graduate degree with significant computational / computer science components or demonstrable equivalent experience in relevant technologies
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Experience with advanced operations in a production Linux environment such as scripting (e.g. bash, awk), configuration management (e.g. Puppet, Ansible), scientific packaging frameworks (e.g. Spack, Easybuild)
• Competence in a high-level programming language (e.g. Python, Golang) and demonstrable experience in at least one relevant technology (e.g. HPC, Cloud computing, storage hardware configuration)
• Experience using AI assisted software development (e.g. VSCode CoPilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, OpenCode)
• Ability to facilitate development of and provide guidance for more junior staff and colleagues.
• Strong customer service ethos (able to cater for technical novices to subject matter experts)

Desirable criteria

• Significant Python development skills (e.g. working with YAML and JSON for significant ETL operations)
• Significant web development skills (e.g. using frameworks such as Laravel, serving sites from docker containers)
• Configuring and diagnosing issues with computer networks (in a production environment)
• Configuring and diagnosing issues with Linux based storage systems (in a production environment)
• Significant Linux administration experience (in a production environment)
• Experience in deploying open weights AI models locally with frameworks such as LiteLLM, Olama and familiarity with concepts such as RAG and MCP.

Further Information

At King’s, we believe that the diversity of our community and a culture that is welcoming, open, inclusive and collaborative, are great strengths of the university.

Interviews are due to be held in October.

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