Senior Linux Engineer

Job Summary

The Office of Information Technology (OIT) encourages applications for a Linux Systems Engineer! The Engineer will provide system administration of centrally-managed infrastructure and shared services for the CU Boulder campus.
The position is responsible for ensuring the availability of critical services by using all layers of the shared application stack, providing performance management, capacity planning, organizational change, monitoring, and responding to service disruptions. This position involves deploying high-availability, fast, stable, scalable, and secure shared service environments in accordance with established standards; ensuring the integrity of system data; and working as part of a larger team to provide a high-quality service to customers.
The University of Colorado Boulder is committed to building a culturally diverse community of faculty, staff, and students dedicated to contributing to an inclusive campus environment. We are an Equal Opportunity employer, including veterans and individuals with disabilities.

Who We Are

Vision:

• Office Information Technology will be valued by campus as a strategic, inclusive and innovative partner in advancing learning and discovery in order to enable CU Boulder to be a premier public university.

Mission:

• Office Information Technology enables campus priorities by providing high-value IT services and solutions.

Values:

• Trust, as a foundation for how we engage with one another and with campus partners, along with
• Avid curiosity in how to better support the campus and our stakeholder’s while
• Fostering empowerment and authentic engagement among ourselves and
• Celebrating inclusivity that promotes a sense of belonging while acknowledging that each person is unique and valued.

Strategy:

• Office Information Technology will advance learning and discovery by delivering high-value reliable IT services and solutions that:
• Provide a fluid and adaptable academic and student experience
• Enable research competitiveness and
• Deliver core infrastructure and enterprise IT services for business effectiveness.

Based on our departmental goals and our commitment to diversity and inclusive excellence, CIO Information Technology particularly welcomes applications from candidates whose knowledge, skills, and abilities, and desire to contribute to an inclusive campus environment, will help us achieve our vision of a diverse and inclusive community.

What Your Key Responsibilities Will Be

Linux Systems Engineer:

• This position will be responsible for ongoing daily system administration of Linux systems that are entrusted to OIT IT Service Engineering and are critical to the mission of the campus. This includes adding and removing hardware, account management, performing system diagnostics, installation and upgrades of operating systems and software, patch maintenance, monitoring, awareness and alignment to campus security requirements, maintaining documentation and providing support to end-users and others in the organization. This also includes working with a configuration management system, helping to develop procedures, configuration files, and synchronization of systems that are managed by said system.
• This position will determine design for service infrastructure based upon the technical requirements provided by a customer or project team; work with internal and external customers to determine specific Operating System design and layout to meet their service requirements (includes determining physical or virtual system, disk layout, software requirements, and required services on the system); decide how to implement system changes based on business, technical, or security policies or requirements; compile and install software and tools requested by internal or external customers as well as required for the ongoing management and security of the system; employ a broad understanding of OIT services to assist with integration fixes; debug system issues and service interruptions and decide when to advance the issue, and help develop new configuration files to manage the configuration of a new class of server.

Configuration Management:

• This position will be responsible for supplying to the configuration management solution (currently Chef and Ansible). This includes creating cookbooks/playbooks and policies for services and systems to be run on premises and in the public cloud, helping with design decisions of configuration management solution, streamlining processes and procedures around configuration management. Additionally, this position will chip in to the design of the testing pipeline, upgrades of Chef code and recipes, and alignment of local cookbooks with those upstream.

Evaluate Strategic and Potential Technologies:

• This position will investigate new technologies that support tactical and strategic objectives. This position will also build, test, and evaluate new technologies to recommend on their applicability to key organizational and program objectives.
• Changes to infrastructure, advances in technology, and changes in regulatory expectations may identify performance constraints or opportunities to particular system infrastructure objectives.

Professional Development:

• This position will maintain proficiency and acquire new technical knowledge by reading technical journals, manuals, newsgroups and websites, attending seminars and conferences, participating in discussions with colleagues, and advising vendors and industry peers.

What You Should Know

• This position is in a hybrid work situation, with the majority of work being performed remotely. This position may infrequently be expected to come on-site, 3 - 4 times per year.
• This position will participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation responsible for ensuring the availability and integrity of a variety of core computing services and is also expected to train on and support other Linux systems, applications, and services.

What We Can Offer

• Salary: $82,000 to 87,000.

Benefits

The University of Colorado offers excellent benefits , including medical, dental, retirement, paid time off, tuition benefit and ECO Pass. The University of Colorado Boulder is one of the largest employers in Boulder County and offers an inspiring higher education environment. Learn more about the University of Colorado Boulder .

What We Require

• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science or closely related field.
• A combination of education and experience may be substituted for the degree on a year for year basis.
• 3 years of RedHat Enterprise Linux or other Linux distribution administration that includes experience:
• Implementing and maintaining sophisticated web systems based on the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack with Nagios supervising environment with Ansible, the Configuration Management System with MySQL with common integration protocols such as SNMP, REST, SOAP, and XML-RPC with software development processes and CI/CD pipelines, or other closely related software.

What You Will Need

• Ability to work independently and be proactive to ensure proper availability of systems/services.
• Ability to collaborate with colleagues to solve sophisticated problems.
• Strong written and oral communication skills.
• Ability to develop relationships with senior, middle management and individual contributors in the CU Boulder campus community.
• Effective interpersonal and organizational skills.

What We Would Like You to Have

• Knowledge of and practical skills with multiple content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, MediaWiki, Drupal, Confluence, etc.
• Knowledge of and skills with web application stack accelerators such as HTTP, accelerators like varnish, PHP cache optimization like APC, and database caching tools like memcached.
• Experience supporting multiple Linux distributions in an enterprise environment.
• Experience supporting containerized applications in an enterprise environment.
• VMWare server virtualization administration experience.
• Sophisticated skills in: Apache Tomcat administration, configuration, and maintenance Apache HTTPD administration, configuration and maintenance Shell scripting (e.g. bash, Perl, Ruby) Knowledge of: physical and virtual networking, routing and DNS.

Special Instructions

To apply, please submit the following materials:

1. A current resume.
2. A cover letter that specifically tells us how your background and experience align with the requirements, qualifications, and responsibilities of the position.

We may request references at a later time.

Please apply by June 4, 2023 for consideration.

Note: Application materials will not be accepted via email. For consideration, please apply through CU Boulder Jobs.

Posting Contact Information

Posting Contact Name: Boulder Campus Human Resources

Posting Contact Email: Recruiting@colorado.edu