Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer

Company: tastytrade Role: Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer Location: Chicago, IL - Hybrid

About the Role

We are looking for a senior Linux engineer who is equal parts operator and builder.

You will own the systems layer of our production environment - from the metal to the configuration management code.

This is a hands-on role: you will jump into incidents, tackle challenging engineering problems, design systems that scale, and evaluate new software and architectures.

This is not a role where the abstractions hide the machine.

You are expected to be curious about what is underneath and to be the person other engineers come to when a system is behaving in a way nobody can explain.

• What You ll Do
• Own Linux performance.

Diagnose and tune systems under real production load: CPU scheduling and NUMA placement, memory and page cache behavior, disk and filesystem I/O, and network stack tuning.

• Lead troubleshooting on hard problems.
• Work incidents methodically - form a hypothesis, find the cheapest test that falsifies it, and narrow the search rather than changing five things at once.
• Write postmortems, organize follow-up tasks, and future-proof the environment so the same issue does not recur.
• Write and maintain configuration management code.
• Build infrastructure declaratively with Salt, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet, treating that code with the same standards as application code: reviewed, tested, and version-controlled.
• Run containerized workloads.

Build, deploy, and operate services on Kubernetes or Nomad, including scheduling behavior, resource limits, health checking, and the failure modes that only appear under contention.

• Automate in Bash and Python.
• Replace manual runbooks with tooling and streamline repeatable work.
• Operate core network services.
• Troubleshoot TCP/IP with confidence and bring solid networking fundamentals.
• Manage DNS and DHCP as production services - zone management, resolver behavior, TTL strategy, scopes, reservations, and relay configuration.
• Operate the traffic and data tier.
• Configure and troubleshoot Nginx and HAProxy (routing, TLS termination, health checks, connection handling) and support Redis and Rabbit MQ in production.
• Manage virtualization.
• Provision and maintain guests across VMware, Xen, or KVM, including capacity planning, host maintenance, and live migration.
• Handle secrets properly.
• Use Vault for secret storage, dynamic credentials, policy, and rotation - and help move the organization off whatever it was doing before.
• Own observability.
• Maintain log aggregation on the Elastic Stack and alerting through Nagios, Check MK, or Icinga.
• Tune alerts toward signal; an alert nobody can act on is a bug.
• Work through change management and code review.
• Everything moves through Git and pull requests.
• You will review other people s changes as seriously as you expect yours to be reviewed.

Who You Are

• 6+ years in a Linux systems, infrastructure, or SRE role.
• Expert-level Linux, specifically: Performance analysis.

You can go from a vague complaint to a named subsystem using the standard tooling - perf, strace, ss, iostat, bpftrace, or equivalents - and explain what the numbers mean.

• Troubleshooting methodology. A disciplined, hypothesis-driven approach that works on a system you have never seen before.
• We care more about how you narrow the problem than about which commands you happen to know.
• Systems fundamentals. Processes and signals, systemd, cgroups and namespaces, filesystems, and what actually happens when a host exhausts memory or file descriptors.
• Declarative configuration management at production scale - Salt, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet. You have authored and maintained the code, not only run it.
• Containerization and orchestration.

Production experience with Kubernetes or Nomad, including the operational realities: scheduling, resource pressure, rollouts, and debugging a workload that will not start.

• Scripting and automation. Strong Bash and working Python. You write code that other engineers can maintain.
• Foundational networking.

Comfortable across layers - VLANs and routing, DNS, DHCP, TCP behavior, and TLS - and able to determine whether a problem is the application, the host, or the network.

• Proxy and load-balancing experience with Nginx or HAProxy.
• Virtualization experience with at least one of VMware, Xen, or KVM.
• Git and peer review as a daily habit, including the discipline to keep changes reviewable.
• Excellent written communication.
• Runbooks, design proposals, and incident write-ups are a core part of this job, not an afterthought.
• The ability to get productive quickly in areas where you do not yet have depth.
• Preferred Qualifications
• Production ownership of Redis or Rabbit MQ as a primary responsibility rather than a dependency.
• Vault administration - policies, auth methods, and rotation at scale.
• Elastic Stack operations at volume: index lifecycle, mapping decisions, and cluster tuning.
• Experience in a regulated environment, or anywhere downtime has a direct revenue cost.
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