Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer

About Northern Light

Northern Light provides the world's most sophisticated machine learning-powered competitive intelligence platform for market research. For over 25 years, we've been helping Fortune 1000 enterprises make smarter, faster, and more informed decisions through our award-winning Single Point knowledge management platform. Our clients include global leaders across technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences who depend on us to transform fragmented data into strategic clarity.

We're a company that takes pride in our compulsive drive to provide exceptional client support. We wake up each day ready to tackle the challenges of knowledge management and we never stand still. Our recent innovations include generative AI capabilities, machine learning insights, and advanced competitive intelligence automation.

The Opportunity

Northern Light is seeking a Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer to take hands‑on ownership of the Linux infrastructure behind our platform's compute‑heavy backend, which runs on our own hardware in a private colocation cage in Somerville, MA. You will be the primary owner of that datacenter environment: the person who keeps it reliable and secure today, and who leads its next phase, including a hardware refresh across the fleet and deeper automation of the environment.

On our Platform team you will own Linux infrastructure, working closely with the engineering, security, and operations teams, including the team that runs our customer-facing frontend in AWS. Our philosophy is to buy our platforms rather than build them: where a supported, vendor-backed product exists, we run it and follow the vendor's best practices instead of maintaining our own substitute. Automation on top of those platforms is very much your work, and we want someone who writes it well and knows how to get the most out of a vendor relationship.

What You'll Own

• A fleet of ~60 HPE Pro Liant DL360 Gen9/Gen
  10 bare-metal servers and ~100 virtual machines running RHEL-family Linux (currently Oracle Linux
  9).
• Virtualization: ~50 VMs on VMware, moving to a new platform this year, and a KVM/libvirt environment running the remaining ~50 VMs, which serve as Kubernetes nodes managed by Dev Ops.
• Core infrastructure services: BIND, LDAP, mail relay, SFTP, and Foreman.
• Self-hosted applications and database servers the product teams depend on:
  Git Lab Self-Managed Premium, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. These are yours at the system level; application and DBA-level tuning stay with the teams that use them.
• Operational tooling: inventory (Net Box), monitoring (Logic Monitor / Site
  24x7 / Grafana), vulnerability management (Tenable One), automation hub (Ansible Automation Platform), backups (Veeam).
• The physical environment: a six-rack private colo cage in Somerville, MA, including spare-parts inventory and hardware lifecycle tracking.
• Routine network operations, such as wiring and top-of-rack switch port configuration. Major network reconfiguration and network device patching sit with our network engineering partner.

What You'll Do

• Keep the fleet current and consistent: patch, harden, and upgrade Linux servers on a controlled cadence through managed repositories and staged rollouts, and install, upgrade, and maintain the applications and database servers to vendor guidance — largely through Ansible roles and playbooks you write and the Ansible Automation Platform you operate.
• Run the vulnerability management cycle: scheduled Tenable scans, triage of findings, remediation prioritization, patching or documented mitigation, and compliance reporting that stands up to customer security reviews and audits.
• Own infrastructure backups (policy, platform administration, restore testing) and partner…