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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Unix Engineer

💰 $90,000 - $150,000

ITSystems EngineeringDevOpsInfrastructure

🎯 Role Definition

As a Unix Engineer you will design, implement, maintain and optimize enterprise Unix/Linux systems to ensure high availability, security, performance and scalability for business-critical applications. You will be the subject-matter expert on Unix-based server platforms (RHEL, CentOS, AIX, Solaris, etc.), automation tools, and system monitoring while collaborating closely with application teams, network, storage, security and cloud engineering to deliver reliable infrastructure and operational excellence.

This role is ideal for engineers with strong shell scripting and automation skills, experience with configuration management (Ansible/Puppet/Chef), exposure to virtualization and cloud platforms (VMware, KVM, AWS/Azure), and a track record of driving performance tuning, incident response, and continuous improvement in production environments.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Unix Administrator / Systems Administrator
  • Linux Support Engineer / Technical Operations Analyst
  • Help Desk Level 2 with server-side experience

Advancement To:

  • Senior Unix Engineer / Lead Systems Engineer
  • Infrastructure Architect / Platform Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) / DevOps Lead

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer / Automation Engineer
  • Cloud Engineer / Platform Operations
  • Database Systems Administrator (DBA) with Unix specialization

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Manage day-to-day administration, tuning, patching and lifecycle management of Unix and Linux servers (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, AIX, Solaris) across physical, virtual and cloud environments, ensuring systems remain secure, patched and compliant with corporate standards.
  • Design and implement automated provisioning, configuration and orchestration workflows using tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or Terraform, reducing manual intervention and accelerating deployment cycles.
  • Develop, maintain and optimize shell scripts (Bash, KornShell), plus Perl or Python utilities, to automate routine operational tasks, log parsing, backup orchestration and incident remediation.
  • Lead capacity planning and resource forecasting for CPU, memory, storage and network footprint; collaborate with architecture and storage teams to ensure future growth is anticipated and resourced.
  • Monitor system health and performance using enterprise monitoring stacks (Nagios, Zabbix, Prometheus, Datadog, Splunk, ELK) and proactively remediate alerts to maintain SLAs and application uptime.
  • Perform system hardening, vulnerability remediation, patch management and configuration audits to meet security and compliance frameworks (PCI, SOC2, HIPAA), and collaborate with InfoSec on risk mitigation.
  • Troubleshoot and resolve complex production incidents—conduct root cause analysis (RCA), create corrective action plans, and drive long-term fixes to eliminate recurring issues.
  • Design and maintain high-availability and disaster recovery architectures (clusters, failover, replication, logical volume management, backups) to ensure rapid recovery and minimal business disruption.
  • Manage storage integration (NFS, iSCSI, SAN), volume management (LVM), RAID configurations and coordinate with SAN/NAS teams to resolve performance and capacity issues.
  • Configure and manage virtualization and hypervisor technology (VMware ESXi, vSphere, KVM) and coordinate VM provisioning, snapshots, backups and lifecycle operations.
  • Support and tune middleware and application platforms running on Unix (web servers, application servers, message queues) in partnership with application owners to optimize reliability and performance.
  • Implement and operate CI/CD pipelines and automated release processes (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Bamboo), integrating system-level tests, configuration pushes and rollback strategies to reduce deployment risk.
  • Maintain and review system logs and audit trails; implement centralized logging and alerting to enable fast forensic analysis and ongoing operational visibility.
  • Implement and maintain network-level configuration for servers (routing, firewall rules, IP address management, TCP/IP tuning) in coordination with networking teams.
  • Provide on-call support, follow incident response procedures, and participate in post-incident reviews to improve monitoring, runbooks and escalation paths.
  • Create and maintain comprehensive system documentation, runbooks, run-time procedures, diagrams and knowledge-base articles to ensure team continuity and accelerate onboarding.
  • Support application migrations, patch cycles and OS upgrades with detailed rollback plans, pre/post validation, and cross-functional coordination to minimize service impact.
  • Mentor and train junior engineers and operations staff on Unix best practices, scripting, troubleshooting and automation techniques to raise team capability.
  • Enforce change management policies: prepare change requests, perform risk assessments, schedule maintenance windows, and verify successful implementations with stakeholder sign-off.
  • Collaborate with cloud engineering teams to integrate Unix workloads with public cloud services (AWS EC2, AWS Systems Manager, Azure VMs), enabling hybrid or cloud-first infrastructure patterns.
  • Execute backup and restore operations, periodically test recovery procedures, and verify integrity of restore operations for system and application data.
  • Participate in performance benchmarking, trace analysis, and kernel tuning (sysctl, ulimit, I/O scheduler) to meet defined latency and throughput objectives for critical applications.
  • Contribute to procurement and vendor management for server hardware, OS subscriptions and enterprise tooling—evaluate technical fit and lifecycle costs.
  • Lead projects to replace or modernize legacy Unix platforms, containerize workloads (Docker) where appropriate, and integrate with container orchestration (Kubernetes) as part of a modernization strategy.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong expertise administering Unix and Linux platforms: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Ubuntu, AIX, Solaris.
  • Advanced shell scripting (Bash, ksh) and experience with automation languages (Python, Perl) to build reliable operational tooling and runbooks.
  • Configuration management and orchestration: Ansible, Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, or Terraform for IaC.
  • Systems monitoring and observability: Nagios, Prometheus, Datadog, Zabbix, Splunk, ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana).
  • Virtualization and hypervisors: VMware ESXi/vSphere, KVM, Xen; experience with VM lifecycle management and performance tuning.
  • Cloud platforms and services: AWS (EC2, S3, EBS, IAM), Azure VMs, or Google Cloud Platform; familiarity with hybrid cloud patterns.
  • Storage and volume management: NFS, iSCSI, SAN concepts, LVM, RAID, filesystem tuning (ext4, XFS, ZFS).
  • Networking fundamentals and troubleshooting: TCP/IP, routing, DNS, load balancers, firewall rules and iptables/nftables.
  • System security and compliance: OS hardening, patch management, vulnerability scanning, SELinux/AppArmor, Kerberos and PAM.
  • High availability and clustering technologies: Pacemaker, Corosync, Veritas Cluster, DR strategies and replication tools.
  • CI/CD and build automation: Jenkins, GitLab CI, Bamboo; Git proficient.
  • Performance tuning and kernel parameter optimization (sysctl), I/O tuning, memory and process management.
  • Backup and recovery tools and methodologies: Bacula, NetBackup, Veeam, snapshots and restore verification.
  • Containerization fundamentals: Docker; exposure to orchestration platforms like Kubernetes for modernization projects.
  • Incident response and on-call experience, including RCA and SLA-driven support.
  • Experience with enterprise logging, alerting thresholds, synthetic transactions and runbook automation.
  • Familiarity with database support from a Unix perspective (coordination with DBAs for Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL).
  • Hardware lifecycle knowledge: server firmware, firmware upgrades, vendor tools (Dell OMSA, HPE iLO).
  • Automation testing and validation of configuration changes in staging environments prior to production rollout.
  • Scripting and automation for security and compliance reporting, audit log collection, and remediation workflows.

Soft Skills

  • Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking with the ability to triage complex incidents under pressure.
  • Excellent communication skills—able to translate technical issues for non-technical stakeholders and produce clear runbooks and post-mortems.
  • Collaboration and teamwork: works cross-functionally with application, network, storage, security and cloud teams.
  • Initiative and ownership: drives projects to completion and follows through on incident remediation and continuous improvement.
  • Time management and prioritization: balance maintenance, projects and incident response in a fast-paced environment.
  • Mentoring and knowledge transfer: coach junior engineers, facilitate technical onboarding and documentation.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning mindset—keeps current with evolving Unix/Linux ecosystem and tooling.
  • Detail-oriented with a strong focus on operational excellence and repeatable processes.
  • Customer-focused approach: align operational decisions with business impact and stakeholder priorities.
  • Ethical approach to security, confidentiality and adherence to corporate policies and compliance requirements.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent experience. Equivalent professional certifications and demonstrable experience will be considered.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related technical field.
  • Professional certifications such as Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), IBM AIX certifications, Linux Foundation Certified Engineer, or AWS/Azure certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Systems Engineering
  • Network Engineering
  • Software Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8+ years administering Unix/Linux systems in enterprise production environments.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of hands-on Unix/Linux engineering experience with demonstrable experience in automation, scripting, and production incident resolution.
  • Proven experience supporting high-availability, security-sensitive and compliance-driven infrastructures.
  • Prior experience in hybrid cloud or cloud migration projects, configuration management at scale, and participation in on-call rotation for critical services.
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