Linux Administrator

Purpose of the role

To support the Close Brothers central Linux infrastructure that currently has five autonomous business units hosted across multiple sites.

The candidate will join a multi-skilled Linux Admin team based at Wimbledon responsible for ensuring the consistent and efficient running of the Linux O/S based infrastructure. Working closely with various support teams including the Service Desk, Network, DBA and Applications Support to ensure that ITIL best practices are followed for Project delivery, Incident, Problem and Service Request management.

Key Responsibilities

• Monitor and administration of the existing Linux systems

• Project delivery for Linux systems

• Keep systems up to date with patches and upgrades during migration project

• Provide 3rd line incident response and problem resolution

• Provide full life cycle application support

• Evaluate new solutions

• Enhance and automate administration tasks

• Design and deploy new systems/services

• Administer the disaster recovery infrastructure

  Conduct, Risk and Compliance

• Ensure that all Governance and Compliance requirements are adhered to and all reporting and reviewing activities required by the Regulatory Bodies are carried out to the standards required

Skills & Experience

Essential

• In depth understanding of Linux systems (preferably RedHat and SLES) with considerable experience

• Commercial experience in supporting 24/7 Linux systems, preferably in a financial services environment

• Strong bash Shell Scripting skills and basic Perl

• Ability to master the command line and common commands (SED, grep, AWK)

• Familiarity with centralized configuration systems like Puppet

• Good Apache Web Server knowledge (SSL, vhosts, rewrite rules, mod_jk, mod_proxy)

• Commercial experience with Tomcat and Jboss application Servers

• Exposure to Java and JDBC (JVM memory management, thread dumps, stack traces)

• Comfortable analysing system logs (Apache Common Log Format, Syslog)

• Basic SQL knowledge

• Familiarity with concepts of virtualization, load balancing, web sessions, high availability, heartbeat, clustering and failover

• Good understanding of TCP/IP and proficiency with common network tools such as netstat, tcpdump, iptables, nmap, Telnet.

• Exposure to openssl and good grasp on cryptography concepts (private/public keys, ssl certificates)

Desirable

• Experience with monitoring tools like Nagios in complex setups

• Exposure to RedHat clusters

• Autobuild systems (kickstart and autoyast)

• Exposure to SAN and NAS in particular related to NFS and iSCSI (Netapp/EMC)

• HTTP load balancers (Zeus ZXTM)

• Knowledge of SNMP protocol and tools

• DNS and DHCP services

• SMTP protocol and Mail Servers (Postfix)

• LDAP

• Familiarity with security best practices

• LVM

• SQUID Proxy Server

• Exposure to Oracle Databases

• Exposure to VMware

• Knowledge of MySQL and Postgres databases would be advantageous

• Exposure to SAP would be advantageous

• Exposure to Liferay would be advantageous

• Knowledge of Hudson/Jenkins would be advantageous

• Ability to work with version control systems such as CVS, Git would be advantageous

• PGP/GPG would be advantageous

Education & Qualifications

Essential: Educated to degree level or equivalent

Desirable: RedHat RHCE Certification, Novell CLE or equivalent