{"id":3709295,"url":"https://alion.io/job/rapidfort-senior-linux-systems-administrator","title":"Senior Linux Systems Administrator","company":{"id":1398,"name":"RapidFort","domain":"rapidfort.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/rapidfort","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":9,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"}},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":125000,"max":165000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":165000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon EC2","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon S3","optional":false},{"name":"Ansible","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Bash","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA","optional":false},{"name":"Debian","optional":false},{"name":"DHCP","optional":false},{"name":"DNS","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"GitLab","optional":false},{"name":"GitOps","optional":false},{"name":"GPG","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"IAM","optional":false},{"name":"Jenkins","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"KVM","optional":false},{"name":"Linode","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"npm","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTofu","optional":false},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":false},{"name":"Proxmox VE","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"QEMU","optional":false},{"name":"TCP/IP","optional":false},{"name":"Tcpdump","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"VMWare","optional":false},{"name":"Wazuh","optional":false},{"name":"Wireshark","optional":false},{"name":"Xen","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-03T19:20:22Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-03","last_verified_at":"2026-11-08T23:39:37Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":5,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":5},"description":"Location: Remote - United States\nDepartment: Information Technology - Infrastructure Engineering\nReports to: Infrastructure Engineering Manager\nEmployment Type: Full-time, individual contributor\nExperience: 8+ years of relevant hands-on experience\nBase Salary: $125,000-$165,000 annually, plus equity and benefits\nEligibility: U.S. citizenship required\nSenior Linux Systems Administrator RapidFort, Infrastructure\n=======================================================================\nABOUT RAPIDFORT\n---------------\nRapidFort helps enterprises and government organizations reduce software\nsupply-chain risk through hardened container images, runtime-based\nattack surface reduction, and automated vulnerability remediation. We\nown and operate the infrastructure that supports our engineering teams\nand core systems.\nABOUT THE ROLE\n--------------\nRapidFort is looking for a senior Linux systems administrator to own and\nrun its infrastructure: bare-metal Linux servers in data centers, the\nvirtual machines and containers that run on them, the networks that\nconnect them to each other and to our staff, self-hosted development\nservices such as GitLab and CI, and our resources in AWS.\nYou will keep these systems reliable, secure and documented, plan and\ncarry out changes to them, and lead the response when something breaks.\nThis is a hands-on senior individual-contributor role with direct\nresponsibility for technical execution. We need someone whose knowledge\nruns from disks and kernels up to routing tables, firewalls and DNS.\nRESPONSIBILITIES\n----------------\nLinux systems administration\n- Build, configure, administer and harden Linux systems: installation,\nsystem services, packages, users, permissions, authentication and\naccess control.\n- Operate a fleet of remotely managed physical Linux servers and the\nvirtual machines and containers on them: storage, capacity planning\nand hardware replacement.\n- Own the operating-system lifecycle: patch testing, staged deployment,\noperating-system and kernel upgrades, tracking exceptions, and moving\nsystems off releases that reach end of life.\n- Keep configurations consistent, and find and correct configuration\ndrift.\nNetworks, cloud and development services\n- Design, run and troubleshoot the network: routing, traffic shaping,\nfirewalls, DHCP and DNS, and the overlay network that connects the\ndata centers, the cloud and remote staff.\n- Manage our resources in AWS, mainly EC2 and S3.\n- Run the self-hosted development services, including GitLab, CI\nrunners, build machines and package mirrors.\nTroubleshooting and incident ownership\n- Independently diagnose production problems involving CPU, memory,\ndisk I/O, filesystems, systemd, networking and service dependencies,\nsuch as failed services, boot problems, resource exhaustion, package\nconflicts and intermittent performance issues.\n- Use logs, metrics and command-line tools to find root causes and to\nconfirm that a fix worked.\n- Monitor the systems, and improve monitoring and alerting so that\nproblems are caught early without needless noise.\n- Lead incident response, contribute to incident reviews, and complete\nthe corrective actions that keep a problem from recurring.\n- Work with developers, IT, data-center staff and hardware vendors when\na problem crosses system boundaries.\n- Escalate when needed, with clear findings, the supporting evidence,\nand a record of the troubleshooting already done.\nAutomation and configuration management\n- Write, debug and maintain Bash scripts for provisioning, diagnostics,\nremediation, reporting and routine operations, and Python automation\nwhere it makes operational work more reliable or simpler.\n- Write and maintain Ansible roles and playbooks to the team's\nstandards.\n- Replace repetitive manual tasks with reliable, maintainable\nautomation.\n- Keep configuration and automation in git, test changes, and make\nchanges through merge requests, review and automated deployment\nrather than by editing live systems.\nSecurity and operational reliability\n- Own access control and security: SSH keys and hardware security keys,\nnetwork access policies, least privilege, security baselines, timely\npatching, vulnerability scanning, audits of exposed services, and\nsoftware supply-chain risk.\n- Run the backups and prove that they restore.\n- Plan changes and maintenance with a written procedure that gives the\nsteps, how to check the result, and a way back.\n- Write and maintain documentation, including runbooks, configuration\nrecords and troubleshooting notes, and review other engineers'\nchanges.\n- Take part in a shared on-call rotation and in scheduled maintenance\nwindows.\nREQUIRED EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS\n------------------------------\nTypically eight or more years administering Linux servers in production\nwith root responsibility, including physical hardware and not only cloud\ninstances, with recent hands-on responsibility for operations and\ntroubleshooting. Solid working knowledge of most of the following.\nLinux systems\n- Linux processes, services, users and permissions, package\nmanagement, filesystems and logging, in depth.\n- Strong experience with Debian and other Linux distributions.\n- Boot and kernel: UEFI, GRUB, initramfs, kernel configuration and\nbuilding, kernel modules (including DKMS) and sysctl.\n- Resource control and diagnosis: cgroups v2, memory management and the\nout-of-memory killer, pressure-stall information (PSI), and tools such\nas strace, perf, iostat, ss and /proc.\n- Both systemd and sysvinit.\nNetworking\n- TCP/IP fundamentals: IPv4 and IPv6, subnetting, bridges, VLANs,\nbonding and NAT, and troubleshooting connectivity.\n- Linux routing: multiple routing tables, policy routing with ip rule,\nsource-based routing, and routing between sites.\n- Traffic shaping with tc: queueing disciplines (HTB, fq_codel, cake),\nclassification with tc filters or firewall marks, and ingress shaping\nthrough ifb.\n- nftables, including sets, maps and connection tracking, and enough\niptables to read and migrate older rule sets.\n- DNS and DHCP: unbound as a validating recursive resolver with local\nzones and forwarding, dnsmasq for DHCP and local DNS, split-horizon\nDNS, and debugging name resolution with dig.\n- WireGuard, and NetBird or a similar WireGuard-based overlay network\nsuch as Tailscale or Headscale: peers, groups, access policies,\nrouting peers for subnets, and DNS. Experience self-hosting the\ncontrol plane is a plus.\n- Reading packet captures with tcpdump or Wireshark.\nStorage\n- ZFS in depth: pool layout, datasets and zvols, snapshots, send and\nreceive, scrubs and resilvering, ARC tuning, and recovering a degraded\nor damaged pool.\n- mdadm RAID, LVM, ext4 and XFS, filesystem repair, SSD caching such as\nbcache or dm-cache, and handling failing disks (SMART, NVMe health).\nVirtualization and containers\n- KVM/QEMU or Xen, LXC and Docker, and enough Kubernetes to debug a\ncluster.\nMonitoring and backups\n- Monitoring and alerting, and backup and recovery, including testing\nthat restores work.\nAWS\n- EC2: instances, images, security groups, EBS, instance profiles and\nthe instance metadata service (IMDSv2).\n- S3: bucket policies, versioning, lifecycle rules and encryption.\n- IAM roles and policies written to the principle of least privilege.\nGit, GitLab, GitOps and configuration management\n- Expert git: branching, merging and conflict resolution in a\nmerge-request workflow, without rewriting or destroying history.\n- GitLab administration: a self-hosted installation and its upgrades,\ngroups, projects and permissions, protected branches, approval rules,\nand CI/CD pipelines and runners.\n- GitOps and infrastructure as code: configuration that lives in git and\nis applied automatically after review, drift detection, and OpenTofu\nor Terraform.\n- Writing and maintaining Ansible roles and playbooks, or substantial\nexperience with a comparable configuration-management tool.\nSecurity\n- Host hardening, least privilege, firewall design, and finding and\nclosing services that are exposed by mistake.\n- SSH in depth: sshd configuration, SSH certificates, and FIDO2 hardware\nkeys such as YubiKeys. GPG signing and verification.\n- TLS certificates and their renewal, and safe handling of secrets.\n- Patch management, vulnerability scanning, software supply-chain risk,\nand investigating incidents from logs.\nScripting\n- Expert Bash: robust scripts with sound error handling, quoting, traps,\nand commands run over SSH, which you can write, troubleshoot and\nmaintain in production on your own.\n- Good working Python for systems automation and operational tooling.\nJudgment and communication\n- A record of personally resolving complex technical problems and\nfollowing through on the corrective actions.\n- Sound judgment about change risk, testing, rollback and escalation.\n- Clear, precise written English for change plans, incident reports,\nreviews, tickets and documentation.\n- The ability to work independently within a remote team.\nPREFERRED\n---------\n- Server hardware: IPMI, iDRAC, iLO and other BMC consoles, RAID and\nHBA controllers, and firmware updates.\n- Diagnosing PCIe devices and their drivers and firmware from kernel\nlogs.\n- Physical data-center work, and working with data-center remote hands.\n- GPU servers, NVIDIA drivers and CUDA environments, and infrastructure\nfor AI workloads.\n- Other virtualization platforms, such as Proxmox or VMware.\n- SAN and NAS storage, and multipathing.\n- Monitoring and host intrusion detection, such as Prometheus, Grafana,\nnetdata or Wazuh.\n- Jenkins or other build farms, and caching mirrors or proxies for apt,\nPyPI, npm or Maven.\n- Backup tools such as restic, borg or ZFS replication.\n- Infrastructure that supports SOC 2 or ISO 27001 controls.\n- Debian and its derivatives.\n- Other cloud providers, such as Linode.","description_format":"text","description_chars":9767,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":true,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"All 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