Senior Research Operations Engineer in London

About 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 and CPU architectures that generate complex problems.

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.

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.

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.

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. The Equality Act of 2010 protects the rights of our students and staff and provides a framework to fulfil our duties to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation and in addition, to advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between those who share a protected characteristic and those who do not.

We are committed to free speech and to academic freedom, believing that our foundational purpose as a university, is to create spaces where a wide range of ideas, including ideas that are controversial, can be discussed and debated, and where members of our community can express lawful views without fear of intimidation, harassment or discrimination.

When engaging in the robust exchange of ideas, we ask that our community is mindful of our Dignity at King’s guidance. We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the person specification section of the job description.

If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible. Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving rapidly, and we recognise its growing role in professional work. Applicants may use AI tools to support preparation of their application, for example to research the role or structure written responses. However, applications must reflect the applicant’s own work and experience.

We reserve the right to close adverts early due to the volume of applications we receive. While the closing date may change, all adverts will close at 23:59 to allow sufficient time for applications to be submitted on that day. We encourage you to apply at the earliest opportunity to avoid disappointment as once we have closed a vacancy you will be unable to submit your application.

Interviews are due to be held in October.

Grade and Salary: £45,031 - £52,514 per annum, including London Weighting Allowance.