Linux System Engineer

Senior Linux/Unix Engineer - Fixed Term Contract 8.30 – 17.00 (7.5 Hours/day – 37.5 hours per week) 3 days office/2 days working from home - Participate in the out of hours on call rota, as well as weekend and project work when required. King William Street, London EC4N 7DA

Primary responsibility: The Senior Linux/Unix Engineer is responsible for deploying, configuring, and maintaining Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Solaris systems on premises and cloud environments. This includes managing system builds, patching, security hardening, performance tuning, and troubleshooting complex OS level issues. The engineer will oversee lifecycle management for RHEL and Solaris servers, ensuring stability, high availability, and compliance with organisational and security standards. Key responsibilities also include automating operational tasks using tools such as Ansible or shell scripting, monitoring system health, supporting application teams with environment requirements, and contributing to the design and implementation of resilient infrastructure solutions. The role requires strong collaboration with security, networking, and application teams to ensure reliable and efficient delivery of Unix based services.

Reporting to: Engineering Team Lead

Principal duties:

• Provide engineering and senior level support for all UNIX platforms, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8/9, Rocky, Solaris 11, and Oracle Linux.
• Supporting core financial applications running on Linux and Solaris environments (any experience of Murex desirable).
• Build, patch, and upgrade systems to ensure stability, security, and compliance.
• Maintain system build images and create packages (RPM) as required.
• Identify opportunities to improve, streamline, or automate operational processes.
• Lead incident management activities, including investigation, resolution, and root cause analysis.
• Assist with fault diagnosis, performance tuning, and provide recommendations for system improvements.
• Manage the full lifecycle of operating systems, including continuous review and deployment of vendor security patches, bug fixes, and communication of EOL milestones to customers.
• Identify hardware and software obsolescence and plan appropriate remediation activities.
• Address recurring issues by implementing fix at source solutions or developing automated/self-healing processes using Ansible, Python, or Bash.
• Maintain strong relationships with stakeholders and act as a trusted technical partner.
• Promote a DevOps mindset by encouraging agile practices and collaboration with other technical teams.
• Continuously review operational processes and procedures to identify efficiencies and drive modern, improved ways of working.
• Provide accurate documentation, technical guidance, and effective solutions to Service Delivery Team.
• Perform trend and capacity management to ensure systems have adequate resources to meet demand.
• Identify and track configuration management drift and support remediation.
• Support disaster recovery and business continuity testing activities.
• Assist with audit activities, including remediation planning and treatment plans.
• Participate in the out of hours on call rota, as well as weekend and project work when required.

Skills and Experiences:

• Minimum of 7 years’ demonstrable senior level administration experience with RHEL 7/8/9 and Oracle Solaris x86.
• Advanced troubleshooting and performance tuning skills across network, disk, memory, and CPU layers, particularly in environments supporting Sybase or Oracle databases.
• Strong experience using Ansible for configuration management, automation, and orchestration across large Linux estates. Ability to write and maintain playbooks, roles, and inventories, and use Ansible Tower/AWX for scheduling and governance. Familiarity with automating patching, compliance, and system state enforcement is highly desirable.
• Proficiency in scripting and automation using Python, Bash, or shell scripting.
• Good working knowledge of NetApp NFS storage, including configuring Linux NFS clients, managing mount options, troubleshooting latency/performance, and understanding export policies.
• Practical, hands-on experience supporting and troubleshooting Linux containers running on Docker or Padman. This includes managing container images, registries, networking, storage layers, and runtime configuration.
• Strong knowledge of Veritas VCS, including filesystem, volume manager, and clustering technologies.
• Knowledge of VMware virtualisation concepts such as ESXi hosts, vCenter operations, virtual hardware, snapshots, and datastore usage. Ability to work with virtual machine configurations and collaborate with VM administrators when deeper support is needed.
• Experience in the banking or financial services industry is beneficial but not essential
• Strong team player mindset with the ability to prioritise workloads effectively, especially under pressure.
• Experience working with cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure.
• Familiarity with Agile or matrixed working environments and a strong DevOps oriented mindset.
• Experience delivering or supporting cyber, security, or risk focused solutions.
• Good understanding of current and legacy hardware standards, along with experience assessing workloads and planning migrations to cloud environments.
• Qualifications: Any Linux, DevOps, VMware, or Cloud accreditation would be beneficial

Policies and Procedures:

• The role holder may be expected to control and/or process personal data, which may include sensitive categories of personal data, of either staff or clients.
• The role holder is responsible for having an awareness of DCME’s GDPR obligations and ensuring that all tasks which control and/or process personal data are carried out in line with internal data protection policies and standards.
• For those in line manager roles, the role holder is also responsible for ensuring their direct reports are aware of and follow internal data protection policies to ensure compliance in the same way.