IT Systems Administrator

Apptronik is a human-centered robotics company developing AI-powered robots to support humanity in every facet of life. Our flagship humanoid robot, Apollo, is built to collaborate thoughtfully with people, starting with critical industries such as manufacturing and logistics, with future applications in healthcare, the home, and beyond. We operate at the cutting edge of embodied AI, applying our expertise across the full robotics stack to solve some of society's most important problems.

You will join a team dedicated to bringing Apollo to market at scale, tackling the complex challenges like safety, commercialization, and mass production to change the world for the better.

As Apptronik continues to scale its humanoid robotics platform, we are seeking an experienced IT Systems Administrator to own the day‑to‑day operation of our on‑premise Linux infrastructure in Austin, TX. This role is responsible for the health, security, and reliability of the physical servers, storage, networking, and compute environments that engineering teams rely on to design, simulate, train, and validate our robots.

You will administer Linux fleets at scale, harden and automate the environment with configuration management and scripting, and partner closely with robotics, ML, and infrastructure engineering teams to keep our build, lab, and data center systems running. The ideal candidate brings deep hands‑on Linux expertise, a strong operational mindset, and the ability to balance reliability, security, and velocity in a fast‑moving robotics R&D environment.

• Administer and maintain a fleet of on‑premise Linux servers (Ubuntu, RHEL/Rocky/Alma, Debian) supporting engineering, simulation, training, and lab workloads
• Own server lifecycle management end‑to‑end: racking, provisioning, imaging, patching, decommissioning, and hardware refresh planning
• Operate and tune on‑prem virtualization and container platforms (VMware vSphere, Proxmox, KVM/libvirt, and Docker/Kubernetes on bare metal) for internal workloads
• Design, deploy, and maintain on‑premise networking — switches, VLANs, routing, DNS, DHCP, NTP, and firewall rules — in partnership with the network team
• Manage on‑prem storage systems including NFS, SMB/CIFS, iSCSI, and SAN/NAS arrays, along with the associated snapshot, replication, and backup strategies
• Implement configuration management and infrastructure‑as‑code using Ansible (preferred), Puppet, Chef, or Salt to ensure consistent, auditable system state across the fleet
• Operate monitoring, logging, and alerting stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki/ELK, Zabbix, or Nagios) and respond to incidents with strong root‑cause analysis
• Harden Linux systems and apply security best practices: least‑privilege access, SSH key management, SELinux/App Armor, kernel and package patching, CIS benchmarks
• Administer identity and access for on‑prem systems via LDAP, FreeIPA, Kerberos, SSSD, and integration with the corporate identity provider
• Author and maintain automation scripts (Bash, Python) for provisioning, reporting, log analysis, and routine operational tasks
• Plan, test, and document backup and disaster recovery procedures for critical on‑prem services; participate in regular restore drills
• Maintain accurate documentation, runbooks, and architecture diagrams for all administered systems; participate in an on‑call rotation for production‑impacting issues

• 4+ years of hands‑on Linux systems administration experience in production environments, with primary expertise on Ubuntu and/or RHEL family distributions
• Strong working knowledge of on‑premise infrastructure: racking and cabling, BIOS/firmware, IPMI/iDRAC/iLO, PXE boot, and hardware troubleshooting
• Solid experience with on‑prem virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere/ESXi, Proxmox, or KVM/libvirt
• Proficient with configuration management tooling (Ansible preferred; Puppet, Chef, or Salt acceptable) and comfortable applying it to a non‑trivial fleet
• Deep familiarity with Linux networking and core network services: DNS (BIND/Unbound), DHCP, NTP/Chrony, TCP/IP, VLANs, routing, and firewalling with…