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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Unix Administrator

💰 $80,000 - $140,000

ITSystem AdministrationDevOpsInfrastructure

🎯 Role Definition

As a Unix Administrator you are the technical owner of Unix and Unix-like server infrastructure across development, staging, and production environments. You will design, deploy, harden, monitor, and troubleshoot systems, automate repetitive tasks, manage configuration and releases, ensure high availability and disaster recovery, and partner with application teams, security, cloud, and networking to deliver reliable, secure, and scalable services. This role requires deep command-line expertise, practical scripting and automation skills, experience with configuration management and CI/CD pipelines, and a strong security-first mindset.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior System Administrator (Unix/Linux)
  • Desktop or Windows Systems Technician with Unix exposure
  • DevOps / SRE I with consolidated OS knowledge

Advancement To:

  • Senior Unix Administrator
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) / Senior SRE
  • Infrastructure Architect or Platform Engineer

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Engineer (AWS/GCP/Azure)
  • Security Operations Engineer
  • Storage/Backup Administrator

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement and operate enterprise Unix/Linux servers (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, AIX, Solaris) to meet availability, capacity, performance, and security requirements; own system lifecycle from provisioning to decommissioning.
  • Create, maintain and improve automation and orchestration for system provisioning and configuration using tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Terraform, or SaltStack to ensure reproducible, auditable deployments.
  • Develop and maintain robust shell scripts (Bash, Ksh) and automation utilities (Python, Perl) to automate routine administration, log collection, patching workflows, and operational runbooks.
  • Lead OS patch management and package lifecycle processes: plan patch windows, test kernel and package updates, coordinate maintenance with stakeholders, and implement rollback procedures to minimize downtime.
  • Architect and operate high-availability cluster solutions (HA clustering, Pacemaker, Corosync, Veritas Cluster Server) and implement failover, load balancing, and redundancy strategies to meet SLAs.
  • Configure, manage and troubleshoot filesystem and storage subsystems (NFS, SAN, NAS, LVM, ZFS) and coordinate with storage teams to provision volumes, optimize I/O and resolve latency issues.
  • Tune system performance at OS level: analyze CPU, memory, I/O, and network bottlenecks using tools like top, vmstat, iostat, sar, perf, and implement kernel parameter optimizations and tuning.
  • Manage user accounts, groups, authentication and authorization systems (LDAP, Active Directory integration, Kerberos, SSSD) and enforce least-privilege access controls.
  • Implement and maintain robust monitoring and observability stacks (Nagios, Zabbix, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK) to provide proactive alerting, dashboards and capacity planning.
  • Design and maintain backup, snapshot and disaster recovery strategies using enterprise tools (NetBackup, Veeam, Bacula) and regularly perform restoration tests and runbooks validation.
  • Harden Unix systems and implement security controls: enforce CIS benchmarks, manage OS-level firewalls (iptables, nftables), apply secure configuration, and support incident response and forensics activities.
  • Maintain and document system architecture, runbooks, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), Change Management records and topology diagrams to ensure operational continuity and onboarding efficiency.
  • Support and integrate applications by working closely with application owners, developers, and middleware teams to tune environments, resolve environment-specific issues and enable CI/CD pipelines.
  • Administer virtualization and container platforms (VMware vSphere, KVM, Hyper-V, Docker, Kubernetes) including provisioning VMs/containers, managing templates/images and lifecycle updates.
  • Implement networking for Unix servers: configure and troubleshoot network interfaces, bonding, VLANs, routing, and collaborate with network engineers on firewall, load balancer, and VPN configurations.
  • Perform root cause analysis for system incidents, leading post-incident reviews, implementing corrective actions and continuous improvement to reduce recurrence and MTTR.
  • Maintain compliance with internal policies and external regulations (PCI, HIPAA, SOC2) by contributing to audits, evidence collection, and remediation of findings at the OS level.
  • Lead capacity planning and lifecycle forecasting: analyze consumption trends, recommend hardware or cloud resource scaling and optimize cost/performance trade-offs.
  • Drive migration and upgrades of OS versions and data center/cloud transitions, including planning, validation, compatibility testing and cutover execution.
  • Build and maintain integration with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Bamboo) for automated deployments and promote immutable infrastructure patterns where applicable.
  • Manage logging, centralization and retention strategies for system logs using syslog, rsyslog, journald and log aggregation platforms; ensure logs are searchable and compliant with retention policies.
  • Provide on-call support rotation for Unix infrastructure, respond to alerts, troubleshoot production issues promptly, and document incident resolution steps.
  • Evaluate and pilot new technologies, tools and processes to modernize infrastructure, reduce toil, and increase automation coverage across Unix estate.
  • Mentor junior administrators, run knowledge-sharing sessions, and contribute to hiring and onboarding efforts to scale the operations team.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist application teams with environment cloning, performance testing environments and pre-production validation.
  • Help establish tagging, labeling and documentation standards for configuration and infrastructure-as-code artifacts.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong Unix/Linux system administration: deep command-line proficiency on RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu, AIX, or Solaris and knowledge of init systems (systemd, SysV).
  • Shell scripting (Bash, Ksh) and higher-level scripting (Python, Perl) for automation, data parsing, log processing and tooling.
  • Configuration management and infrastructure-as-code: hands-on experience with Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Terraform or SaltStack for reproducible deployments.
  • Virtualization and containers: experience with VMware, KVM, Docker and orchestration basics of Kubernetes or OpenShift.
  • Storage and filesystems administration: practical skills with LVM, NFS, ZFS, SAN protocols (iSCSI, Fibre Channel) and performance tuning.
  • Monitoring and observability: set up and operate Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, Zabbix, ELK/EFK stacks and implement service-level alerting.
  • Networking fundamentals for servers: IP addressing, bonding, VLANs, routing, firewall rules (iptables/nftables), and interaction with load balancers.
  • Authentication and directory services: integrate and troubleshoot LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos and SSSD-based authentication.
  • Backup, snapshot and recovery technologies: NetBackup, Veeam, Bacula or vendor-specific tools and tested DR processes.
  • Security hardening and compliance: CIS benchmarks, system patching strategies, intrusion detection basics, audit logging and remediation.
  • Performance analysis and tuning: experience with tools like top, vmstat, iostat, sar, perf, tcpdump and strategies for kernel tuning.
  • CI/CD and release pipelines: Jenkins, GitLab CI, Bamboo, Nexus and methods to deploy and roll back system changes safely.
  • Cloud fundamentals: exposure to AWS, Azure or GCP compute/storage networking for hybrid deployments and migration planning.
  • Troubleshooting and incident management: structured RCA, runbook creation, and postmortem facilitation.
  • Scripting-driven automation for provisioning, scaling and configuration validation.

Soft Skills

  • Strong communication skills: able to explain technical issues clearly to non-technical stakeholders and write concise runbooks and documentation.
  • Collaboration and teamwork: works effectively with developers, security, network, and cloud teams to deliver integrated solutions.
  • Proactive problem solver with strong attention to detail and ability to operate under pressure during incidents.
  • Time management and prioritization: manage multiple requests and incidents while balancing project work.
  • Mentoring and knowledge transfer: coach junior staff, lead technical discussions, and contribute to continuous learning within the team.
  • Customer-focused mindset: understands business impact and prioritizes stability and availability for production services.
  • Analytical thinking and data-driven decision making: use metrics and logs to guide troubleshooting and capacity planning.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning: stays current with evolving Unix/Linux ecosystem, security threats and automation tools.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Information Systems, or Electrical Engineering.
  • Relevant industry certifications (RHCE, LPIC, AWS Certified SysOps/DevOps, CompTIA Linux+, IBM AIX certification).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Software Engineering
  • Systems Engineering
  • Network Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3 - 8+ years of hands-on Unix/Linux system administration in enterprise environments.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years administering production Unix/Linux systems with demonstrable experience in automation, monitoring, security hardening, and high-availability architectures.
  • Experience supporting regulated or high-availability systems, large-scale clusters, or cloud-hybrid infrastructures.
  • Proven track record of leading migrations, capacity planning initiatives, and participating in 24x7 on-call rotations.
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