Principal Linux Engineer

The Principal Linux Engineer is the senior technical authority for the enterprise Linux platform and serves in a Linux support lead capacity, owning the design, build standards, hardening, and day-to-day reliability of the Linux server estate. The role additionally supports the Debian-based Linux operating system (Debian 13 "trixie" on ARM hardware) that ships embedded in certain company products, partnering with Product Engineering and R&D on OS image build, hardening, patching, and field escalations.

This role sets engineering, scripting, and automation standards across both estates and acts as the final escalation point for complex Linux incidents and root-cause analysis.

This position manages the Linux support queue and on-call rotation, mentors junior and mid-level engineers, and partners with Security, Network, Database, Applications, and Quality teams to sustain systems available, secure, compliant, and audit-ready in a 24x7x365 environment.

• Serve as technical lead and final escalation point for Linux support, owning triage, root-cause analysis, and permanent corrective action for complex incidents.
• Own the architecture, build standards, and lifecycle of the Linux estate (RHEL and derivatives), including capacity planning and hardware/OS refresh.
• Define and enforce configuration management and infrastructure-as-code practices using Ansible, Terraform, Git, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Provide engineering and support ownership for the Debian Linux OS distributed as part of company products, including image definition, kernel and device-tree configuration, package selection, hardening, and release qualification.
• Partner with Product Engineering, R&D, Manufacturing, and Field Service on Raspberry Pi image provisioning at build, unattended upgrade and patch delivery mechanisms, and escalated field issues.
• Lead performance analysis, fault isolation, and reporting of service exceptions across the Linux estate
• Partner with Network, Security, Windows, Database, and Application teams on data center builds, migrations, and cross-platform projects.
• Mentor and develop Linux engineers and administrators, providing technical direction, training, and workload prioritization.
• Author and maintain SOPs, runbooks, and change/configuration records in line with company quality and regulatory requirements, and perform other duties as assigned by the organization.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent work experience.
• A minimum of ten years of progressive Linux systems administration/engineering experience in production data center environments, that includes a minimum of three years in a lead, principal, or equivalent senior technical capacity.
• Experience building, hardening, and supporting an embedded or appliance Linux OS that ships as part of a product, including reproducible image creation (debootstrap, pi-gen, rpi-image-gen, or equivalent), first-boot provisioning, and read-only or A/B root file system strategies.
• Hands-on experience supporting databases on Linux:
  Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB.
• Experience working in a production data center environment, including clustering, high availability, and disaster recovery for Linux workloads.
• Experience operating in a regulated environment (GxP, ISO, or similar) with change control, documentation, and audit support.
• Experience with cloud hosting, SaaS, PaaS technologies – AWS experience preferred.
• Red Hat certification (RHCSA/RHCE) strongly preferred; cloud, security, or ITIL certifications a plus.

• Expert-level knowledge of enterprise Linux administration and internals:
• o Distributions: RHEL, CentOS/Rocky/Alma Linux, Debian (including…