Linux Systems Engineer (Bare Metal & Kubernetes)

812ed792-1aae-4de0-b986-2ab8e417b320; Sydney; On-site; AUD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Cox Purtell in Sydney, Australia, is seeking a Linux Systems Engineer to join its Global Linux team. You will design, build and operate on-prem, bare-metal Linux platforms and Kubernetes clusters powering a live trading environment.

You will own provisioning, orchestration and automation, with a focus on reliability and performance in a high-demand setting. This role requires strong production Linux experience, hands-on Kubernetes, and incident-driven improvements.

Qualifications

• Strong Linux systems engineering experience in a production environment.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy and operate on-prem Kubernetes clusters in a bare-metal environment.
• Maintain and improve bare-metal Linux infrastructure, including provisioning, lifecycle management and performance tuning.
• Own and operate core Kubernetes components such as the CNI, GitOps tooling and cluster management layer (currently Cilium, ArgoCD and Rancher).
• Build and maintain CI/CD workflows and infrastructure as code for infrastructure and cluster deployments.
• Take part in an on-call rotation, drive post-incident improvements, and document runbooks so the wider team can support the platforms.

Skills

Linux

Kubernetes

GitOps

Terraform

CI/CD

Networking

Performance tuning

On-call support

Tools

Cilium

ArgoCD

Rancher

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Job description

About the Role

As Linux Systems Engineer, you'll join the Global Linux team responsible for the infrastructure that powers a live trading environment, spanning large-scale bare-metal Linux platforms and on-prem Kubernetes clusters. You'll design, build and operate systems the business depends on every day, from hardware provisioning through to orchestration and automation. This is ownership of foundational infrastructure, not managed cloud abstraction, in a setting where reliability and performance matter.

Duties

• Design, deploy and operate on-prem Kubernetes clusters in a bare-metal environment.
• Maintain and improve bare-metal Linux infrastructure, including provisioning, lifecycle management and performance tuning.
• Own and operate core Kubernetes components such as the CNI, GitOps tooling and cluster management layer (currently Cilium, ArgoCD and Rancher).
• Build and maintain CI/CD workflows and infrastructure as code for infrastructure and cluster deployments.
• Take part in an on-call rotation, drive post-incident improvements, and document runbooks so the wider team can support the platforms.

Requirements

• Strong Linux systems engineering experience in a production environment.
• Hands-on experience running Kubernetes or comparable infrastructure on-prem, not solely through managed cloud offerings.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and CI/CD or GitOps workflows. Terraform, ArgoCD, Rancher, Cilium and GitHub Actions are all useful, and depth in the specific stack can be built on the job.
• Solid understanding of networking fundamentals, including L2/L3, routing, firewalls and load balancing.
• Experience troubleshooting performance issues across the kernel, container and network layers.
• A production mindset, with experience in incident response and post-mortem-driven improvement.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Kubernetes security controls, or low-latency and high-performance environments will be highly regarded.

If this sounds like the kind of infrastructure challenge you're after, we'd love to hear from you.