Unix System Administrator

Unix/Linux Infrastructure Engineer (Contract)

Contract Length: 12 months

Location: London (Hybrid – 2-3 days onsite per week)

Rate: £550-£650 per day (Inside IR35)

Overview

We are seeking an experienced Unix/Linux Infrastructure Engineer to provide BAU operational support across a large-scale enterprise Linux estate. The environment consists primarily of Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosted on enterprise compute, storage and virtualisation platforms.

The successful candidate will act as a key operational contact for Linux infrastructure incidents, service requests and platform support activities, ensuring high service availability, strong stakeholder communication and adherence to operational processes and SLAs.

This role also includes participation in patching cycles, change implementation, vendor coordination and an out-of-hours support rota.

Key Responsibilities

• Triage, prioritise and resolve Unix/Linux infrastructure incidents and service requests within agreed SLAs.
• Act as an escalation point for application and operational teams during major incidents, including participation in P1/P2 bridges.
• Support post-incident reviews and contribute to problem management activities.
• Execute Linux patching and maintenance activities, including scheduled out-of-hours changes.
• Perform routine platform administration including:
• Filesystem and capacity management
• Log maintenance
• Certificate renewals
• User access reviews
• Coordinate with infrastructure and hardware vendors for fault diagnosis, hardware replacement and support activities.
• Raise and implement infrastructure changes through formal change management processes.
• Maintain operational documentation, runbooks and knowledge base articles.
• Respond to monitoring alerts and support backup/restore activities.
• Participate in an on-call rota and provide out-of-hours operational support.
• Support disaster recovery testing and resilience activities.

Required Experience

Essential

• Proven experience supporting business-critical Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments.
• Strong background in BAU infrastructure support within enterprise environments.
• Experience using ITSM tooling for incident and request management.
• Demonstrated experience handling stakeholder escalations during high-priority incidents.
• Experience coordinating with third-party vendors for infrastructure support and hardware issues.
• Previous participation in on-call support rotas and maintenance windows.

Technical Skills

Essential

• Administration and troubleshooting of RHEL 7/8/9.
• Strong Linux systems administration and operational support experience.
• Understanding of enterprise server and storage environments.
• SAN and Fibre Channel fundamentals.
• Good knowledge of Unix/Linux networking concepts including TCP/IP, DNS and NTP.
• Bash scripting and ability to work with existing Python scripts.
• Backup and restore administration experience.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Desirable

• Red Hat Satellite.
• Ansible / automation tooling.
• Kubernetes or OpenShift exposure.
• VMware administration experience.
• Azure infrastructure exposure.
• Monitoring and observability tooling.
• LDAP / Active Directory integration with Linux.
• Enterprise backup platforms.