Linux Infrastructure Engineer

About the Role

With consultative direction within the Core Services group, this position is responsible for architecting, optimizing, and maintaining a high-velocity, on-premises Linux data pipeline supporting real-time, AI-driven machine learning models for the DIII-D national fusion reactor program. As a hands-on technical practitioner, you will manage bare-metal deployments, orchestrate high-availability parallel storage arrays, and troubleshoot ultra-low-latency network protocols across a heavily segmented, secure infrastructure. This role focuses on deep, OS-level infrastructure and physical data center operations, bridging the gap between raw hardware capabilities and mission-critical scientific computing.

Responsibilities

• Bare-Metal & OS Administration: Plan, manage, and optimize day-to-day operations of on-premises, physical x86 and GPU server infrastructure running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
• High-Velocity Networking: Provision and troubleshoot core network sharing protocols (NFS) and ultra-low-latency networking hardware supporting 100GbE backbones and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv2).
• Operational Technology (OT) Security: Maintain and fortify a heavily firewalled, push-only segmented internal network architecture, ensuring strict "Deny All Inbound" rules protect sensitive reactor control systems.
• Storage Architecture Lifecycle: Build, configure, and maintain high-density NVMe storage tiers and software-defined, parallel filesystems (BeeGFS/ZFS) to handle massive multi-gigabyte payload dumps with zero ingestion bottlenecks.
• Performance & I/O Benchmarking: Conduct granular system-level I/O benchmarking, diagnose deep kernel-level platform anomalies, and implement kernel parameter tuning to maximize data velocity and prevent data loss.
• Automation & Provisioning: Develop and maintain automated infrastructure workflows and configuration management frameworks using Bash shell scripting and Ansible to streamline bare-metal node deployment and environment validation.
• Data Center Operations: Manage physical data center footprints, including high-density server rack layouts, equipment delivery, hardware diagnostics, power infrastructure/UPS, and asset lifecycle tracking.
• Collaborative Consultation: Act as a technical infrastructure expert, guiding the development of innovative solutions to unique computing challenges for data acquisition systems and scientific teams.
• Vendor & Planning Coordination: Analyze new hardware architectures, engineer custom hardware Bill of Materials (BOM) alongside OEMs/ODMs, and represent the organization as a primary technical contact with suppliers.
• Compliance & Safety: Observe all laws, regulations, and facility safety obligations, ensuring that all system upgrades and physical data center modifications are designed with established personnel operating procedures properly considered.

Qualifications

• Typically requires a bachelor's degree in information technology or a related discipline and fifteen or more years of progressive professional experience in an information technology department primarily in systems administration. May substitute equivalent working experience in the field in lieu.
• Expert Linux Skills: Detailed and extensive technical expertise in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) system design, installation, configuration, and low-level kernel troubleshooting.
• Storage Mastery: Proven hands-on experience implementing, configuring, and performance-tuning ZFS, RAID, and LVM storage structures.
• Networking Fundamentals: Comprehensive understanding of TCP/IP networking, host-based firewalls, network bonding, and debugging network sharing protocols across segmented topologies.
• Automation Background: Demonstrated proficiency writing advanced automation scripts in Bash or Python, coupled with configuration management toolsets (Ansible).
• Physical Infrastructure Competency: Direct experience handling physical server deployment, rack configuration, hardware component replacement, and diagnostic testing within an enterprise data center environment.

Preferred Skills

• Familiarity with High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster environments and workload scheduling managers (e.g., SLURM, PBS Pro).
• Experience configuring or administering parallel file systems (e.g., BeeGFS).
• Familiarity with distributed, event-driven streaming architectures or message brokers (e.g., Apache Kafka).
• Familiarity with in-memory data structures or caching layers (e.g., Redis).
• Experience with open-source hypervisors and virtualization platforms (e.g., Proxmox).
• Exposure to GPU computing clusters and high-performance environments (e.g., NVIDIA/Mellanox).

Pay

Salary range: 116,480 - 208,505

Schedule

Full-Time