Linux System Administrator

Excellent opportunity for an experienced Linux System Administrator to join our client's Engineering team in Southampton. This is an exciting opportunity for someone who enjoys designing, managing, and continuously improving the infrastructure that enables software and hardware engineers to deliver cutting-edge technology. Working within a highly technical environment, you'll take ownership of our on-premise infrastructure, ensuring platforms remain secure, scalable and highly available. You'll also champion automation, helping to reduce manual processes and improve the efficiency of our engineering operations.

The Role

As Linux System Administrator, you will:

• Manage and enhance the physical and virtual infrastructure that supports our engineering teams.
• Maintain the reliability, security, and performance of development environments across multiple platforms.
• Work closely with software and hardware engineers to understand infrastructure requirements and deliver practical, scalable solutions.
• Drive automation initiatives that simplify infrastructure deployment, configuration, and ongoing administration.
• Monitor system health, troubleshoot complex technical issues and implement improvements to maximise uptime.
• Contribute to the ongoing evolution of our infrastructure, tooling, and operational best practices.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Strong Linux administration skills across distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian and Rocky Linux/Red Hat.
• Good understanding of networking concepts, including switching, firewalls and fault diagnosis.
• Experience administering virtualisation environments, ideally using XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra.
• Storage management experience, with exposure to NetApp being advantageous.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure automation using tools such as Ansible and Terraform or OpenTofu.
• Administration of Jenkins, including server configuration and CI/CD pipeline creation.
• Experience implementing monitoring and observability solutions using platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana or Zabbix.
• Proficiency in scripting with Bash and/or Python.

Desirable Skills

It would be beneficial if you also have experience with:

• Kubernetes administration and Rancher.
• Automated bare-metal provisioning using technologies such as iPXE or Redfish.
• Secrets management platforms, including HashiCorp Vault.
• Software licence management tools such as FlexLM/FlexNet.
• CI/CD platforms including Azure DevOps.
• Artifactory administration.
• Slurm Workload Manager.
• Windows Server, Active Directory, Microsoft 365, Azure and Entra ID administration.

Spectrum IT Recruitment (South) Limited is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.