Platform Desktop Engineer — Linux & Automation

G-Research; City of Westminster; On-site; GBP 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Annual discretionary bonus

Lunch provided

30 days annual leave

9% pension contributions

Healthcare

Cycle-to-work

Monthly events

Job summary

G-Research, based in London, seeks a Platform Desktop Engineer to own the Linux image pipeline, provisioning tooling, and security for the estate. You will work with Linux Engineering, Security and infrastructure teams to deliver robust desktop platforms across the research environment.

You will contribute to image builds, provisioning automation, monitoring, and incident response, while collaborating with cross-functional teams to improve reliability and scale.

Qualifications

• Strong Linux administration skills, including package management, filesystems, permissions, and networking.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across logs, CPU, memory, I/O and network performance.
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines for OS image creation.
• Python scripting skills, with the ability to make safe changes to internal tooling.
• Strong understanding of security best practice, with judgment to balance risk and practical requirements.
• Experience with monitoring and dashboards, using data to assess system health.
• Experience with OpenStack and Ironic for bare metal and VM provisioning at scale.
• Understanding of hardware provisioning and lifecycle, including BMC and lights-out management.
• Experience supporting technical users in a live environment.
• Excellent communication skills, with ability to set expectations and explain technical trade-offs.
• A calm, methodical approach to incidents and escalation.

Responsibilities

• Maintaining the OS image build pipeline using Dagger, Packer, Jenkins and Bash
• Operating and developing Python-based provisioning tooling across OpenStack and Ironic, troubleshooting bare metal and VM provisioning issues
• Managing estate security, including certificate lifecycle, vulnerability remediation and patching
• Managing changes through testing, staged rollouts, communications and rollback where required
• Monitoring estate health, availability and patching, maintaining dashboards and resolving configuration issues
• Providing user support, resolving requests and incidents escalated from first line
• Supporting joiner, mover and leaver processes in partnership with HR and hiring managers
• Managing hardware provisioning and lifecycle, including diagnostics, firmware, warranties and RMAs
• Contributing to capacity planning across physical and virtual resources
• Supporting incident response and driving remedial actions through to completion
• Escalating complex issues to Linux Engineering and other teams with a clear technical diagnosis

Skills

Linux administration

Troubleshooting

CI/CD pipelines

Python scripting

Security best practices

Monitoring dashboards

OpenStack

Ironic

Hardware provisioning

User support

Communication skills

Incident response

Tools

Dagger

Packer

Jenkins

Job description

G-Research, based in London, seeks a Platform Desktop Engineer to own the Linux image pipeline, provisioning tooling, and security for the estate. You will work with Linux Engineering, Security and infrastructure teams to deliver robust desktop platforms across the research environment.

You will contribute to image builds, provisioning automation, monitoring, and incident response, while collaborating with cross-functional teams to improve reliability and scale.