Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer - Local to Somerville, MA

Northern Light•Somerville, MA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer will own Northern Light’s production datacenter environment, including approximately 60 bare-metal servers, about 100 virtual machines, and a six-rack private colocation cage in Somerville, Massachusetts. The role is on the Platform team and partners with engineering, security, operations, DevOps, vendors, and the network engineering partner. The infrastructure supports SinglePoint’s search, analytics, NLP enrichment, and AI features for enterprise research teams. The engineer will maintain and secure the current environment while leading a fleet hardware refresh, a virtualization-platform migration, and expanded automation. The environment includes HPE ProLiant servers, RHEL-family Linux (currently Oracle Linux 9), VMware and KVM/libvirt virtualization, core infrastructure services, product-team systems, and operational tooling. The role emphasizes supported, vendor-backed platforms, automation, reliability, clear documentation, and sound vendor relationships. The position is described as hybrid in the Boston area, with at least two days a week at the Somerville office and datacenter, and Eastern Time working hours. Datacenter tasks may be handled by the engineer or by the colocation provider’s remote-hands service, with planning and work orders coordinated by the role. When working in the datacenter cage, conditions include elevated noise and variable temperatures. Scheduled after-hours maintenance has historically occurred three to five times per year. The posted salary is $150,000–$160,000, plus benefits. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States; visa sponsorship is unavailable.

Requirements

Typically 7 or more years of production Linux systems engineering experience, including several years accountable for the reliability and security of an environment, independently or as a senior member of a small team.
Expertise with RHEL-family Linux such as RHEL, Oracle Linux, Rocky, Alma, or CentOS, including systemd, kernel and performance tuning, LVM, RAID, NFS, bonding, VLANs, and firewalld or iptables.
Production virtualization experience with VMware vSphere, KVM/libvirt, OpenShift Virtualization, Proxmox, Hyper-V, or similar.
Experience authoring and maintaining Ansible roles and playbooks, not only running them.
Experience with scheduled vulnerability scanning using Tenable/Nessus, Qualys, Rapid7, or similar; interpreting findings and driving fleet remediation.
System-level application and database operations experience, including packaging, storage, TLS, access control, and backups based on vendor documentation; ability to plan rollback-capable database upgrades and verify backups through restores.
Enterprise hardware experience with HPE ProLiant or equivalent, including iLO/IPMI, firmware, diagnostics, component replacement, and occasional physical datacenter work.
Experience designing or materially improving redundant infrastructure, leading incident response, and writing useful root-cause analyses.
Networking fundamentals sufficient to make routine switch changes and diagnose and scope switch, firewall, and load-balancer issues for network engineers.
Strong documentation habits and clear written and spoken communication.
Authorization to work in the United States; visa sponsorship is not available.

Nice To Haves

A BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Information Technology; practical experience is valued more highly.
Experience with the specific products named in the posting, including the listed infrastructure, monitoring, vulnerability-management, automation, backup, and system platforms.

Responsibilities

Own and maintain the production datacenter fleet of approximately 60 bare-metal servers and 100 virtual machines, including Linux, virtualization, and physical infrastructure.
Lead the hardware refresh and virtualization-platform migration, and expand automation across the environment.
Patch, harden, and upgrade Linux servers on a controlled cadence using managed repositories and staged rollouts.
Install, upgrade, and maintain applications and database servers according to vendor guidance, using Ansible roles and playbooks and operating Ansible Automation Platform.
Run vulnerability management, including scheduled scans, triage, remediation prioritization, patching or documented mitigation, and compliance reporting.
Own infrastructure backup policy and platform administration, test restores, and partner with the application team on disaster-recovery planning and exercises.
Maintain effective monitoring coverage, actionable alerts, and trustworthy logs for incident investigation.
Lead infrastructure incident response and post-incident reviews, drive corrective actions to completion, and maintain clear SOPs, runbooks, and diagrams.
Operate the datacenter remotely by keeping NetBox inventory accurate, cabling labeled, iLO or out-of-band access available, spare parts stocked, and remote-hands work orders clear.
Coordinate hardware lifecycle and capacity with vendors and the colocation provider, and coordinate maintenance windows and network changes with the network partner.
Perform routine network operations, including wiring and top-of-rack switch port configuration; diagnose and scope more substantial network issues for network engineers.
Revise DNS and SMTP deployments and redeploy them without load balancers during the first 30 days.
Reconsider backup and disaster-recovery strategy, revise and deploy the tool set, and test it with a real restore within the first 90 days.
Establish an end-to-end patch and vulnerability cycle, begin the hardware refresh, improve alert quality, and leave the environment more automated and documented within one year or less.