Senior Linux Systems Engineer — Remote (US)

Nationwide IT Services, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

medical insurance

dental insurance

vision insurance

life insurance

disability insurance

401(k) plan with employer match

paid holidays

PTO (sick/vacation)

commuter benefits

employee assistance program (EAP)

educational reimbursement

Pet Insurance

Job summary

Nationwide IT Services, NIS, is seeking a hands-on Linux Systems Engineer to support mission-critical scientific systems and infrastructure for the USGS. You will own complex problems, perform root-cause analysis, and work across applications, databases, networking, automation, monitoring, security, and messaging to drive resolution.

This role emphasizes strong Linux fundamentals and practical problem solving over pure DevOps tooling.

Qualifications

• Hands-on Linux systems administration experience in enterprise or production environments.
• Ability to independently troubleshoot complex problems and perform root-cause analysis.
• Strong understanding of Linux services, processes, logs, filesystems, permissions, packages, configuration, and general system operations.
• Experience performing system maintenance, patching, configuration, troubleshooting, and operational support.
• Experience using monitoring and logging information to investigate system or application behavior.
• Hands-on scripting or automation experience.
• Ability to read and follow application or automation code to support troubleshooting.
• Working knowledge of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, ports and protocols).
• Familiarity with relational databases and SQL basics.
• Security concepts such as patching, access controls, host firewalls, remediation, and secure configurations.
• Willingness to investigate unfamiliar technologies across domains.

Responsibilities

• Administer, maintain, troubleshoot, and support Linux-based production, development, test, and supporting infrastructure.
• Investigate system and application problems through logs, configuration, monitoring data, network behavior, application code, and DB activity.
• Perform root-cause analysis and drive issues toward resolution.
• Escalate or route issues to software developers, network engineers, security personnel, or other specialists as needed.
• Perform Linux system maintenance, patching, configuration, and service management.
• Support system security and hardening activities, including vulnerability remediation and access controls.
• Use and maintain automation and configuration-management capabilities.
• Work with monitoring systems to understand system health and alerts; modify monitoring as needed.
• Support relational databases at an operational level (installation/configuration, connectivity, basic SQL).
• Support messaging and event-driven infrastructure for inter-system communication.
• Read application/automation code to troubleshoot; trace logic and communicate findings to developers.
• Develop or modify scripts and lightweight automation for administration, troubleshooting, monitoring, and operations.
• Troubleshoot networking connectivity and internal communications.
• Collaborate with staff across systems, software, networking, security, and scientific operations to resolve cross-boundary issues.
• Document technical findings, configurations, troubleshooting steps, and procedures.

Skills

Linux systems administration

Troubleshooting

Scripting

Networking fundamentals

Security basics

Communication

Education

High school diploma

Tools

PostgreSQL

Ansible

Nagios

Prometheus

Grafana

RabbitMQ

Kafka

Git/GitLab

AWS

Job description

Nationwide IT Services, NIS, is seeking a hands-on Linux Systems Engineer to support mission-critical scientific systems and infrastructure for the USGS. You will own complex problems, perform root-cause analysis, and work across applications, databases, networking, automation, monitoring, security, and messaging to drive resolution.

This role emphasizes strong Linux fundamentals and practical problem solving over pure DevOps tooling.