Senior Linux Administrator

Senior Linux Administrator Cambridge, UK | Full-time | Permanent | Hybrid Salary: 60,000 to 75,000 + Bonus + Equity The salary range for this role is broad, as we are able to consider varying levels of experience.  Any offer made will carefully take into account level of experience (including relevant industry experience), transferable relevant skills and previous relevant achievements.

About us Riverlane’s mission is to master quantum error correction (QEC) and unlock a new age of human progress. From advances in material and climate science, to complex chemistry simulation for new drug design, quantum computers will help humanity solve some of its most important challenges. But without QEC, the industry’s defining technical challenge, such breakthroughs can never be achieved.  Riverlane is the world leader in QEC technology.

QEC is a complex problem that requires a range of skills, talent and passion.  Having raised more than $125M in funding to date to accelerate our cutting-edge R&D in quantum error correction (QEC), Riverlane partners with many of the world’s leading quantum hardware providers and government agencies to make fault-tolerant quantum computing a reality. We’re making remarkable progress and growing fast. 

About the role Riverlane is looking for an experienced Linux administrator to own and grow our core computational infrastructure. This is a hands-on role combining day-to-day administration of our High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment with longer-term planning, automation, and improvement of our infrastructure estate.

You'll be the primary owner of our HPC cluster and core Linux infrastructure, working closely with IT management and wider Infrastructure Team to keep systems reliable today while building towards a more resilient, scalable environment for tomorrow.

Key Responsibilities HPC Cluster Administration Administer and maintain the HPC cluster, including compute nodes, storage systems, and networking.

Evaluate and evolve cluster topology, compute node configuration, and hardware resource utilisation as the estate grows.

Lead the deployment, configuration, and troubleshooting of HPC tooling, particularly Slurm — including queue structures and job scheduling policies.

Monitor system performance and ensure high availability of HPC resources, using observability tools such as Prometheus; investigate anomalies and outages.

Assess and maintain the network file storage solution for throughput, scalability, and latency.

Business As Usual (BAU) Administration Maintain, patch, and troubleshoot core Linux infrastructure (RHEL).Act as an escalation point for complex technical issues raised by the Riverlane team.

Provide operational upkeep of core infrastructure, including servers, tooling, and licence managers.

Maintain Synopsys EDA tooling, including licence server management, environment configuration, and performance optimisation for electronic design automation workflows.

Provide sound technical support to users of the HPC environment.

Improve self-service capability for users, enabling routine tasks (e.g. restarting VNC sessions, resetting passwords) to be performed without engineering intervention.

Automation & Enhancement Automate routine tasks using scripting and infrastructure-as-code tools (Bash, Python, Ansible).Collaborate with the Infrastructure Team to plan and implement improvements to HPC infrastructure.

Own work packages and deliver them within agreed sprint windows.

Build and maintain documentation for systems, processes, and configurations.

Communicate effectively with stakeholders on progress and delivered improvements.

Security, Compliance & Resilience Ensure security and compliance across the HPC estate, including security hardening and lifecycle management.

Maintain and develop the off-site backup strategy, ensuring data integrity, disaster recovery readiness, and compliance with data retention policies.

Requirements & Experience Extensive experience administering and growing infrastructure in fast-paced engineering environments.

Enterprise Linux expertise: deep knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) administration, security hardening, lifecycle management, and troubleshooting.

Hands-on experience configuring, scaling, tuning, and troubleshooting job schedulers (e.g. Slurm) and distributed compute environments.

Strong understanding of network file storage protocols and network optimisation for computational workloads.

Proficient with container environments and virtualisation…