Senior Red Hat Linux Systems Engineer

Role Overview As the Senior Red Hat Linux Systems Engineer, you will serve as the technical authority and team lead for our RHEL Managed Services infrastructure. You will drive platform standards, architect automation workflows, and manage the technical delivery of core OS operations across enterprise environments. Leading a dedicated three-person engineering team, you will oversee patching cycles, security hardening, golden image lifecycles, and high-impact infrastructure projects. Key Responsibilities Lead a 3-person RHEL engineering team; plan workloads, assign daily operational tasks, review technical evidence, and mentor junior engineers.

Own six annual OS patching and hardening cycles across SIT, UAT, DR, and Production. Plan readiness checks, change strategies, rollback procedures, validation, and post-cycle reporting.

Design, build, and maintain enterprise RHEL golden images (covering RHEL 7, 8, 9, and RHEL 10 adoption planning) integrated with required infrastructure and security agents.

Develop and maintain production Ansible playbooks/cookbooks for automated server provisioning, in-place upgrades (IPUG), and CIS-aligned OS hardening.

Lead patching, upgrade, and maintenance activities for NPS and VCS environments according to the agreed service calendar.

Evaluate cybersecurity alerts from regulatory, national, and internal security bodies. Assess infrastructure exposure, define remediation pathways, submit compliance assessments, and ensure closure.

Provide technical leadership for OS obsolescence remediation, data center relocations, storage migrations, and audit remediation tasks.

Required Qualifications & Experience Degree or Diploma in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.

7–10 years of overall Linux systems administration experience, including at least 4 years dedicated to enterprise RHEL environments.

Deep hands-on experience with RHEL 7/8/9 (RHEL 10 exposure/planning is a strong plus), including kernel/package management, systemd, LVM, storage/filesystems, networking, performance tuning, and recovery.

Advanced hands-on experience using Ansible or Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) to build, review, and troubleshoot automation workflows.

Practical working knowledge of CIS Benchmarks, vulnerability remediation, privileged access management, and audit evidence standards.

RHCE strongly preferred; RHCSA (or demonstrable equivalent experience) required.