On Site Systems Administrator

On Site Systems Administrator (US)

Location:

Maryland

Team:
Research

Employment Type:

Full-Time

While this is a hybrid role, the position requires regular onsite management of physical lab equipment in Baltimore area on call off hours and weekends.

Vuln Check is looking for a Systems Administrator / Lab Manager to build, maintain, and operate the lab infrastructure that supports our vulnerability research team. This role is responsible for standing up and managing a research environment that includes networking equipment, IoT / OT devices, and the supporting compute, storage, and network infrastructure our researchers depend on to discover, analyze, and validate vulnerabilities.

You’ll work closely with our exploit developers and threat researchers to ensure they have reliable, secure, and reproducible environments for testing against real-world hardware and software. The lab is central to Vuln Check’s mission — our researchers need to move fast, and the infrastructure has to keep up.

• Design, build, and maintain the physical and virtual lab infrastructure used by Vuln Check’s vulnerability research team.
• Procure, configure, and manage networking equipment (routers, switches, firewalls, wireless access points) and IoT / OT devices used for security research and exploit validation.
• Manage lab network architecture — including segmentation, VLANs, out-of-band management, and isolated test environments to safely run exploit code against live devices.
• Administer Linux and Windows servers, hypervisors, and virtualization platforms (e.g., VMware, Proxmox, KVM) that host vulnerable software and services for testing.
• Maintain firmware libraries and device inventories, ensuring researchers have access to specific hardware and software versions needed for vulnerability analysis.
• Provide remote access infrastructure (VPN, jump hosts, remote console access) so distributed team members can interact with physical lab equipment.
• Automate environment provisioning, configuration management, and lab reset workflows using tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or similar.
• Monitor lab systems for availability, performance, and security — and respond to issues promptly.
• Collaborate with researchers to understand upcoming research targets and proactively prepare the lab environments they need.
• Manage vendor relationships for hardware procurement, warranties, and RMA processes.
• Document lab architecture, procedures, and runbooks to ensure operational continuity.

• 8+ years of experience in systems administration, lab operations, or infrastructure engineering.
• Experience managing physical lab infrastructure remotely, including out-of-band management (IPMI/iLO/iDRAC), remote PDUs, and KVM-over-IP.
• Strong systems and network monitoring experience, building and tuning, Prometeus, Grafana, Zabbix, Netfolw, Zeek.
• Strong hands‑on experience with Linux system administration (Ubuntu, CentOS/RHEL, or similar) install and ownership.
• Solid networking fundamentals — TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, firewall, router configuration. Top of rack.
• Experience managing and configuring networking equipment (Cisco, Juniper, Mikro Tik, etc), must have physical firewall and network switching experience.
• Familiarity with IoT devices and embedded systems — comfortable working with serial consoles, JTAG, firmware flashing, and device provisioning.
• Familiarity with OT/ICS devices and protocols is a huge plus.
• Experience with virtualization and containerization technologies (VMware, Proxmox, KVM, Docker).
• Experience with configuration management and infrastructure‑as‑code tools (Ansible, Terraform, or similar).
• Ability to work independently and manage priorities across multiple concurrent research efforts.
• Strong documentation habits and clear written communication.
• Scripting skills in Python, Bash, or Go for automating lab workflows; familiarity with Go is a plus.

• Experience using Claude or other AI models for task automation.
• Prior experience supporting a security research, penetration testing, or red team lab environment.
• Prior cybersecurity work experience (at a vendor or in government).

This position may involve…