Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Unix Systems Administrator

💰 $80,000 - $140,000

ITSystems AdministrationUnixDevOpsInfrastructure

🎯 Role Definition

A Unix Systems Administrator is responsible for the installation, configuration, tuning, maintenance and support of Unix and Unix-like operating systems (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX) and related infrastructure components. This role ensures high availability, security, performance and scalability of mission-critical servers and services, drives automation of routine tasks, participates in incident response and change control, and collaborates with development, networking, and security teams to deliver reliable production systems.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Unix / Linux Administrator with 1–3 years of hands-on experience.
  • Systems Support Engineer or Technical Support Engineer transitioning to server administration.
  • Linux Engineer or DevOps Engineer focused on platform operations.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Unix Systems Administrator / Lead Systems Engineer
  • Systems Architect / Infrastructure Architect
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or Senior DevOps Engineer
  • Infrastructure Manager or Head of Platform Engineering

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Engineer (AWS/Azure/GCP)
  • Storage / SAN Administrator
  • Security Operations or Compliance Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Manage the full lifecycle of Unix servers including provisioning, OS installation, configuration, patching and lifecycle upgrades across diverse Unix flavors (Red Hat/CentOS, Ubuntu, Solaris, AIX), ensuring consistent, secure, and documented configurations for production and non-production environments.
  • Lead troubleshooting of complex production incidents by rapidly diagnosing hardware, kernel, filesystem, network and application-level issues; coordinate rollbacks, fixes and post-incident action plans while minimizing business impact.
  • Design and implement robust backup and disaster recovery strategies (NetBackup, Bacula, snapshot-based, replication) and perform regular restore testing to ensure RTO/RPO commitments are met.
  • Develop, maintain and optimize shell and scripting solutions (Bash, KornShell, Python, Perl) to automate repetitive tasks, improve operational efficiency, and support configuration management workflows.
  • Implement configuration management and automation using tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef or SaltStack to enforce idempotent server configurations, streamline deployments and reduce configuration drift.
  • Administer virtualization and hypervisor platforms (VMware ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V) and support virtual machine lifecycle operations, performance tuning, and resource allocation for mixed physical/virtual environments.
  • Manage and tune storage and file systems (LVM, XFS, EXT4, ZFS, NFS) including mount/resize operations, quota management, and coordination with SAN/NAS teams to provision and troubleshoot block and file storage.
  • Monitor system health and performance using tools such as Nagios, Zabbix, Prometheus, Grafana or Splunk; create and maintain alerts, dashboards, and runbooks to proactively identify capacity or performance issues.
  • Harden Unix systems and enforce security policies in partnership with InfoSec: patch management, vulnerability scanning remediation, secure configuration baselines, SELinux/AppArmor tuning, SSH hardening, and privilege access control.
  • Participate in patch planning and lifecycle maintenance windows; evaluate vendor advisories, stage and validate patches in test environments, coordinate scheduled maintenance and communicate outage impacts to stakeholders.
  • Configure and manage core network services on Unix platforms such as DNS (Bind), DHCP, NTP, SMTP relay and routing-related configurations; collaborate with network teams for performance and security tuning.
  • Administer user and group accounts, authentication and directory services (LDAP, Active Directory integration, Kerberos), enforce least privilege access and manage sudoers and PAM policies.
  • Implement and maintain high-availability and clustering solutions (Pacemaker/Corosync, HAProxy, load balancers) to ensure redundancy and failover across critical services.
  • Support application and middleware platforms by working with development teams to deploy, tune and debug server-side components, JVM tuning, middleware configuration, and log aggregation/analysis.
  • Maintain and update system documentation, runbooks, standard operating procedures and configuration baselines to ensure reproducibility, compliance and smooth on-call transitions.
  • Drive capacity planning and forecasting by analyzing utilization trends, projecting growth, and recommending hardware or architectural changes to meet future demand.
  • Manage security and compliance reporting for audits (PCI, HIPAA, SOC2), produce evidence of configuration controls and participate in remediation activities required by audit findings.
  • Operate as part of an on-call rotation, respond to incidents and service outages during nights/weekends, perform root cause analysis and follow through on permanent fixes and documentation updates.
  • Collaborate on cloud migration and hybrid architectures, integrating on-prem Unix systems with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) including provisioning, networking, IAM and cost/usage tracking.
  • Support CI/CD and DevOps initiatives by integrating system provisioning with IaC pipelines (Terraform, CloudFormation), preparing immutable images, and automating release windows with minimal downtime.
  • Implement logging, metrics and tracing pipelines to improve observability (ELK/EFK, Fluentd, Prometheus exporters) and enable faster problem detection and resolution across distributed systems.
  • Evaluate, recommend and manage third-party enterprise tools and appliances (backup, monitoring, configuration management) to support platform resilience and operational efficiency.
  • Mentor and train junior administrators and cross-functional teams on Unix best practices, scripting techniques, and troubleshooting methodologies, contributing to a continuous learning culture.

Secondary Functions

  • Assist with cross-platform operational tasks including basic Windows server support, where necessary, to ensure integrated service delivery across heterogeneous environments.
  • Participate in project-based work such as datacenter migrations, hardware refreshes, OS migrations (e.g., Solaris -> Linux) and infrastructure modernization initiatives.
  • Contribute to procurement decisions by providing technical requirements and evaluating vendor proposals for servers, SAN/NAS, hyperconverged infrastructure, and support services.
  • Maintain the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) entries for Unix assets, ensuring accurate records of system owners, configurations and network topology.
  • Provide input to capacity, performance and cost-optimization initiatives for cloud-hosted Unix workloads and containerized services.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep experience administering Unix and Unix-like operating systems (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX) in enterprise production environments.
  • Proficient in shell scripting (Bash, KornShell) and at least one higher-level scripting language (Python or Perl) for automation, log parsing and tooling.
  • Practical knowledge of configuration management and automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef or SaltStack.
  • Hands-on experience with virtualization technologies (VMware vSphere/ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V) including VM provisioning, resource tuning and troubleshooting.
  • Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and experience integrating on-prem Unix systems with cloud services and IAM.
  • Experience with monitoring, alerting and observability stacks (Nagios, Zabbix, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Splunk).
  • Strong understanding of storage concepts and management of SAN/NAS, LVM, file systems (XFS, ext4, ZFS) and NFS exports.
  • Solid networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, routing, VLANs, firewall rules, DNS, NTP and troubleshooting network-related issues on Unix hosts.
  • Experience with backup and recovery technologies (NetBackup, Veeam, snapshots) and demonstrated ability to execute and validate restores.
  • Knowledge of security best practices: patch management, vulnerability scanning, SELinux/AppArmor, encryption, secure SSH and compliance requirements (PCI, HIPAA, SOC2).
  • Familiarity with containerization and orchestration concepts (Docker, Kubernetes) and building container-ready Unix images or supporting container host nodes.
  • Proficiency with version control systems (Git) and integrating administrative scripts/configs into CI/CD or deployment pipelines.
  • Experience with high-availability and clustering solutions, load balancers and failover configurations.
  • Ability to perform kernel and filesystem tuning, performance benchmarking and capacity planning for server farms.

Soft Skills

  • Clear written and verbal communication to produce runbooks, postmortems, and to coordinate with application, network and security teams.
  • Strong analytical and structured problem-solving skills with an emphasis on root cause analysis and durable fixes.
  • Customer-service orientation with ability to manage stakeholder expectations and communicate technical issues to non-technical audiences.
  • Effective time management and prioritization under pressure, especially during incident response and maintenance windows.
  • Proven ability to work both independently and collaboratively in cross-functional teams and mentoring junior staff.
  • Detail-oriented with a disciplined approach to change control, documentation and compliance.
  • Adaptable and continuous learner who stays current with emerging Unix/Linux technologies, cloud patterns and automation trends.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or equivalent practical experience; or an associate degree with commensurate hands-on experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or Electrical/Computer Engineering.
  • Industry certifications such as Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), LPIC-2/3, IBM AIX Certified System Administrator, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, or similar.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years of hands-on Unix/Linux systems administration experience in enterprise or large production environments.

Preferred: 5+ years administering mixed Unix platforms (Linux, AIX, Solaris) with strong expertise in automation (Ansible/Chef/Puppet), scripting (Bash/Python), virtualization (VMware/KVM), monitoring and incident response. Experience with cloud integrations (AWS/Azure), security/compliance programs and handling on-call rotations is highly desirable.

Explore More Careers