Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer - Local to Somerville, MA

Northern Light•Somerville, MA

4d•$150,000 - $160,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer owns and operates Northern Light’s production datacenter environment, including approximately 60 HPE ProLiant bare-metal servers, approximately 100 virtual machines, and a six-rack private colocation cage in Somerville, Massachusetts. The environment runs RHEL-family Linux, currently Oracle Linux 9, and supports SinglePoint’s compute-heavy backend for search, analytics, NLP enrichment, and AI summarization. The role sits on the Platform team and collaborates with engineering, security, operations, DevOps, vendors, and the network engineering partner. The engineer will keep infrastructure reliable and secure while leading a hardware refresh, a virtualization platform migration, and expanded automation. Responsibilities span Linux systems, virtualization, core infrastructure services, system-level application and database operations, monitoring, vulnerability management, backups and disaster recovery, incident response, datacenter inventory and hardware lifecycle, and routine network operations. The role emphasizes using supported, vendor-backed platforms, following vendor best practices, and building effective automation with Ansible. The position is hybrid in the Boston area, with at least two days per week at the Somerville office and datacenter. Some hands-on datacenter work may involve elevated noise and variable temperatures; remote hands are also available for routine tasks. Eastern Time working hours are specified. The role is full-time, and 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, storage (LVM, RAID, NFS), and networking (bonding, VLANs, firewalld/iptables).
Production virtualization experience with VMware vSphere, KVM/libvirt, OpenShift Virtualization, Proxmox, Hyper-V, or similar.
Experience writing and maintaining Ansible roles and playbooks.
Experience with scheduled vulnerability scanning using Tenable/Nessus, Qualys, Rapid7, or similar, interpreting results, and driving fleet-wide remediation.
System-level application and database operations experience, including packaging, storage, TLS, access control, and backups using vendor documentation.
Ability to plan database upgrades with rollback and to validate backups through restoration.
Enterprise hardware experience with HPE ProLiant or equivalent, including iLO/IPMI, firmware, diagnostics, and component replacement; comfort with occasional physical datacenter work.
Experience designing or materially improving redundant infrastructure, leading incident response, and writing 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.
Experience with the specific products named in the posting, including VMware, KVM/libvirt, BIND, LDAP, Foreman, GitLab Self-Managed Premium, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, NetBox, LogicMonitor, Site24x7, Grafana, Tenable One, Ansible Automation Platform, and Veeam.

Responsibilities

Own the production datacenter environment, including approximately 60 bare-metal servers, approximately 100 virtual machines, and a six-rack private colocation cage.
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, primarily using Ansible roles and playbooks.
Operate Ansible Automation Platform and develop automation for infrastructure management.
Manage vulnerability scans, triage findings, set remediation priorities, patch or document mitigations, and produce compliance reporting.
Own infrastructure backup policy and platform administration; test restores and partner with the application team on disaster recovery planning and exercises.
Maintain complete monitoring coverage, useful alerts, and trustworthy logs for incident investigation.
Lead infrastructure incident response and post-incident reviews, drive corrective actions to closure, and maintain clear SOPs, runbooks, and diagrams.
Maintain accurate NetBox records, labeled cabling, iLO/out-of-band access, spare-parts inventory, and work orders for remote hands.
Work with vendors and the colocation provider on hardware lifecycle and capacity; coordinate maintenance windows and network changes with the network partner.
Perform routine network operations, including wiring and top-of-rack switch port configuration.
Lead the hardware refresh and virtualization platform migration, and improve infrastructure automation.
Revise DNS and SMTP deployments and redeploy them without load balancers during the first 30 days.
Reconsider and revise the backup and disaster recovery strategy and toolset, then deploy and test it with a real restore within the first 90 days.
Establish a full end-to-end patch and vulnerability cycle, begin the hardware refresh, improve alert quality, and increase automation and documentation within one year or less.