NineTech
Infrastructure Lead- Linux
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Infrastructure Lead
£550 OUTSIDE OR IR35
6 Month Contract
FULLY REMOTE
We’re looking for an experienced Infrastructure Lead to provide technical direction across our infrastructure environment while remaining a highly hands-on engineer. This is a senior technical leadership role for someone with deep platform engineering experience who enjoys working close to the infrastructure, solving complex production problems and making pragmatic technical decisions.
Our environment is primarily self-managed, dedicated and bare-metal infrastructure, rather than public cloud. You’ll help shape the technical direction of our infrastructure while continuing to work directly with Linux systems, physical servers, networking, automation, observability and infrastructure security.
Security is a core part of the role, with responsibility spanning encryption, secrets management, key management, PKI and certificate lifecycle management. You’ll be expected to lead from the front: setting technical direction, raising engineering standards and helping the team make good decisions, while still being comfortable getting hands-on with production systems and code.
What you’ll do
- Provide technical leadership and direction for the infrastructure and platform engineering function while remaining hands-on.
- Lead the design, evolution and operational management of production infrastructure across Linux, dedicated servers, bare-metal and colocation environments.
- Manage and maintain Ubuntu Linux servers in production, including systemd, processes, filesystems, package management, logging and system troubleshooting.
- Operate infrastructure across dedicated hosting providers such as Hetzner and OVH, as well as colocation environments and data centres.
- Design, configure and troubleshoot routing, DNS, firewalls and VPNs.
- Work directly with physical infrastructure, including diagnosing and resolving hardware failures.
- Establish sound technical approaches to infrastructure reliability, scalability, security and operational resilience.
- Troubleshoot complex production issues, driving investigations towards root cause rather than short-term fixes.
- Plan and oversee infrastructure changes with a clear understanding of system dependencies, operational risk and production impact.
- Set standards and best practices for infrastructure automation using scripting, Ansible and configuration management.
- Use metrics, dashboards, alerts and logs to understand system behaviour, improve observability and identify emerging issues.
- Assess the security implications of infrastructure and architectural changes, including vulnerability remediation, access control and secrets management.
- Provide technical guidance on encryption, key management, PKI and certificate lifecycle management.
- Work closely with software engineers, architects and other technical teams, raising questions and identifying risks early.
- Mentor and support engineers through technical guidance, design reviews and problem-solving, helping to raise the overall engineering standard.
- Make pragmatic technology decisions, balancing security, reliability, performance, operational complexity and engineering effort.
- Help define the longer-term infrastructure roadmap and identify opportunities to improve reliability, automation and operational efficiency.
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What we’re looking for
- 8–10+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform engineering, systems engineering or a closely related discipline.
- Deep platform/infrastructure engineering expertise combined with a strong hands-on technical and coding background.
- Proven ability to provide technical leadership while remaining an individual contributor.
- Extensive hands-on experience managing Ubuntu/Linux production environments.
- Strong knowledge of Linux fundamentals, including systemd, processes, filesystems, packages and logs.
- Significant experience operating dedicated servers, bare-metal infrastructure and/or colocation environments.
- Strong networking fundamentals, including routing, DNS, firewalls and VPNs, with the ability to troubleshoot complex networking issues.
- Experience working directly with physical servers and diagnosing hardware problems.
- Strong troubleshooting and analytical skills, with a consistent focus on identifying and resolving root causes.
- A strong understanding of system dependencies and the ability to design and implement changes without disrupting production.
- Experience with Ansible, scripting and infrastructure automation.
- Experience with monitoring and observability, including metrics, dashboards, alerts and logs.
- Strong understanding of infrastructure security, including vulnerability management, access control and secrets handling.
- Experience translating compliance and security requirements into technical infrastructure controls.
- Ability to make sound technical decisions and clearly communicate trade-offs to engineers and stakeholders.
- Comfortable working closely with developers and challenging assumptions constructively.
- Experience mentoring engineers and establishing engineering standards, practices and ways of working.
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Desirable experience
You don’t need to have experience with everything below, but strong experience across several of these areas would be highly valuable:
- Operating and scaling a fleet of hundreds of servers.
- ZFS and Linux storage technologies.
- Designing and operating WireGuard networks.
- KVM/QEMU virtualisation.
- VictoriaMetrics, Grafana and ELK or similar observability platforms.
- Ability to read and understand Go code.
- Rootless containers, particularly Podman.
- CoreDNS and Cloudflare.
- Terraform and Kubernetes.
- Designing and implementing encryption at rest and encryption in transit.
- Automated key generation, management and rotation.
- Automated certificate issuance, renewal, rotation and revocation as part of Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM).
- PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) and certificate authority infrastructure.
- Designing and implementing infrastructure security controls and security best practices.
- Enterprise certificate lifecycle management platforms.
- Self-hosted key management systems and automated key rotation.
- Secrets management tools such as SOPS, OpenBao/Vault or AWS Secrets Manager.
- Disk and filesystem encryption on Linux hosts.
- Automated certificate renewal and deployment for services running on Linux.
- Security frameworks and audits such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2.
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