Senior Linux Platform Engineer

TEKsystems; Burlington (NJ); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

TEKsystems seeks a Senior Linux Platform Engineer to own enterprise Linux platforms, drive automation, and ensure reliability across RHEL and SUSE environments. This hands-on senior IC role partners with infrastructure, cloud, security, and operations teams to deliver automated, secure, and scalable platform services in a 24x7 retail setting.

You will lead technical projects end-to-end, improve observability, and coordinate with offshore resources to meet service levels and quality standards.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in a technical field.
• 10+ years of hands-on Linux engineering in enterprise environments.
• Strong experience with RHEL and SUSE in mission-critical systems.
• Proficient in automation and configuration management tools.
• Proven ability to lead projects and mentor others.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain enterprise Linux platform standards for RHEL/SUSE.
• Own automation, provisioning, patching, and configuration management.
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and permanent remediation.
• Coordinate with security, cloud, and application teams for reliability.
• Drive observability with monitoring and logging across platforms.
• Mentor junior engineers and manage cross-team delivery.

Skills

Linux engineering

Automation

Troubleshooting

Collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent experience

Tools

Ansible

Terraform

Puppet

Bash

Python

Git

CI/CD tooling

Datadog

Dynatrace

Nagios

SolarWinds

New Relic

Job description

Description

The Senior Linux Platform Engineer is responsible for the engineering, automation, reliability, security, and lifecycle management of enterprise Linux platforms supporting corporate and distribution center operations. This role designs and maintains scalable Linux platform standards across RHEL and SUSE environments, drives automation and configuration consistency, supports production reliability, and serves as a Senior technical escalation point for mission‑critical systems in a 24x7 retail environment. This is a hands‑on Senior individual contributor role. The engineer will partner with infrastructure, cloud, application, database, security, and operations teams to deliver secure, resilient, supportable, and automated Linux platform services. The role is expected to lead technical projects end‑to‑end, reduce manual operational effort, improve observability and recovery capabilities, and help modernize the Linux platform estate. The role also provides technical direction and delivery coordination across internal teams, managed services providers, and offshore engineering resources to ensure Linux platform is aligned to service levels, quality standards, operational priorities, and business needs.

A Day in the Life

Linux Platform Engineering, Automation, and Lifecycle Management

• Design, engineer, configure, and maintain enterprise Linux platform standards for RHEL and SUSE environments.
• Build and maintain automation using Ansible, Terraform, Bash, Python, Git, and CI/CD tooling.
• Develop repeatable patterns for provisioning, patching, configuration management, package deployment, access control, monitoring integration, and decommissioning.
• Own Linux OS lifecycle planning, including version currency, vendor supportability, patch compliance, firmware/driver dependencies, and upgrade roadmaps.
• Maintain and improve Linux images, templates, RPM/package standards, configuration baselines, and platform documentation.
• Evaluate and recommend platform improvements to increase scalability, reliability, security, and operational efficiency.

Production Reliability, Observability, and Operations Engineering

• Serve as a Senior escalation point for complex Linux platform incidents in a 24x7 production environment.
• Lead troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and permanent remediation for recurring or high‑impact issues.
• Define and maintain monitoring, alerting, dashboards, logging, and operational health checks using tools such as Datadog, Dynatrace, Nagios, SolarWinds, or similar platforms.
• Drive capacity planning, performance analysis, tuning, and proactive risk remediation.
• Support disaster recovery planning, testing, documentation, and continuous improvement.
• Participate in on‑call rotation and maintenance windows for critical platforms.

Security, Compliance, and Governance

• Engineer Linux platform baselines aligned to internal security standards, SOX, PCI‑DSS, and audit requirements.
• Implement and maintain access controls, privileged access practices, encryption, logging, auditing, vulnerability remediation, and configuration compliance.
• Partner with cybersecurity and audit teams to remediate findings and provide evidence of control effectiveness.
• Improve security posture through standard hardening patterns, automated compliance checks, and remediation workflows.

Virtualization, Cloud, Storage, Backup, and Modernization

• Engineer and support Linux workloads running on private and public cloud.
• Engineer and support SAN/NAS, backup/recovery, and related storage services.
• Partner with cloud and application teams on migration, modernization, and hybrid‑cloud enablement where appropriate.
• Support Linux integration with DNS, DHCP, SSO, LDAP/Active Directory, NTP, and other network services.
• Support cloud‑native container, serverless and PaaS modernization initiatives.

Technical Leadership, Managed Services Coordination, Standards, and Documentation

• Lead assigned Linux engineering projects from planning through implementation, communication, change execution, and post‑change validation.
• Develop technical standards, diagrams, runbooks, implementation plans, operational procedures, and recovery documentation.
• Mentor administrators and junior engineers on Linux platform practices, automation, troubleshooting, and change discipline.
• Provide day‑to‑day technical guidance and work prioritization.
• Collaborate with application, database, security, cloud, infrastructure, vendor, and business teams to deliver stable and supportable solutions.
• Coordinate work with managed services providers and offshore engineering resources, ensuring alignment to service levels, operational priorities, quality standards, and defined processes.
• Manage handoffs, escalations, and cross‑time‑zone collaboration across hybrid onshore/offshore delivery models.
• Hold internal and external technical resources accountable for execution quality through clear expectations, feedback, governance, and adherence to change, incident, and problem‑management practices.

You'll Come With

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of hands‑on Linux engineering, systems engineering, DevOps, or platform engineering experience in enterprise production environments.
• Strong experience with RHEL and/or SUSE Linux in mission‑critical environments.
• Strong Linux troubleshooting skills across OS, kernel, storage, networking, authentication, services, performance, and application dependencies.
• Experience with automation and configuration management tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, Bash, Python, Git, and CI/CD tooling.
• Strong understanding of vSphere or similar virtualization platforms, compute, server hardware, firmware, and lifecycle management.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, logging, alerting, and operational health tools such as Datadog, Dynatrace, Nagios, SolarWinds, New Relic, or similar.