Principal Linux Engineer

Location: Hybrid in Rockville, Maryland, United States; traditional office and data center work, with some local travel between office sites and the ability to work standing and lift up to 50 pounds.

Annual base salary: $116,600–$177,800, plus potential discretionary or non-discretionary bonus.

Company

hirify.global develops diagnostic products that include embedded Linux systems.

What you will do

• Serve as the technical lead and final escalation point for Linux support, including triage, root-cause analysis, incident response, and permanent corrective actions.
• Own the architecture, build standards, lifecycle, capacity planning, and hardware and operating-system refreshes for the RHEL-based Linux estate.
• Define and enforce configuration management, infrastructure-as-code, scripting, automation, Git, and CI/CD standards using Ansible and Terraform.
• Engineer and support the Debian Linux OS shipped in company products, including image definition, kernel and device-tree configuration, package selection, hardening, release qualification, and remote patch delivery.
• Partner with Product Engineering, R&D, Manufacturing, Field Service, and infrastructure teams on Raspberry Pi provisioning, data center builds, migrations, field issues, and cross-platform projects.
• Manage the Linux support queue and on-call rotation, mentor engineers, prioritize workloads, and maintain SOPs, runbooks, change records, and configuration documentation.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent work experience.
• At least 10 years of progressive Linux systems administration or engineering experience in production data center environments, including at least 3 years in a lead, principal, or equivalent senior technical capacity.
• Experience building, hardening, and supporting an embedded or appliance Linux OS shipped as part of a product, including reproducible image creation, first-boot provisioning, and read-only or A/B root filesystem strategies.
• Hands-on Linux database support experience with Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB.
• Production data center experience with clustering, high availability, and disaster recovery for Linux workloads.
• Experience in a regulated environment such as GxP or ISO, including change control, documentation, and audit support.
• Experience with cloud hosting, SaaS, and PaaS technologies.
• Expert enterprise Linux knowledge covering RHEL, CentOS/Rocky/AlmaLinux, Debian including Debian 13 “trixie”, Ubuntu, kernel tuning, systemd, LVM, filesystems, networking, and performance diagnostics.
• Linux security hardening and vulnerability remediation experience, including CIS benchmarks and SELinux.
• Expert knowledge of physical and virtual server installation and configuration, patch and errata management at scale, backup and restore operations, Ansible, Terraform, Git, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Hands-on Debian 13 “trixie” expertise on Raspberry Pi, including APT, dpkg, .deb packaging, apt pinning and preferences, unattended upgrades, and local or private APT repositories.
• Working knowledge of ARM64/aarch64 Linux and Raspberry Pi boot firmware, device-tree overlays, GPIO/I2C/SPI and serial peripherals, SD/eMMC endurance, and thermal and power constraints.
• Familiarity with product OS release qualification, remote upgrades, field patch delivery, rollback strategies, and CVE tracking against a shipped software bill of materials.
• Expert Shell and Python scripting skills for automation, tooling, and diagnostics.
• Strong understanding of DNS, HTTP/S, LDAP, SSH, NFS, Kerberos, SMTP, SNMP, Active Directory integration, network concepts, the OSI model, web applications, web services, service-oriented architectures, and network/web protocols.
• Ability to provide supportive day-to-day technical guidance and mentoring, lead major incident response, perform advanced problem-solving and root-cause analysis, and brief senior leadership on risk, incidents, and roadmap.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to work standing in data centers, data closets, and secure environments and move or lift up to 50 pounds.

Nice to have

• Red Hat certification such as RHCSA or RHCE.
• Cloud, security, or ITIL certifications.
• AWS experience.
• VMware vSphere and container platform experience with Docker, Kubernetes, or OpenShift.
• Perl scripting experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work in a traditional office environment with collaboration across Security, Network, Database, Applications, Quality, Product Engineering, R&D, Manufacturing, and Field Service teams.
• 24x7x365 operational environment with an on-call rotation and focus on secure, compliant, audit-ready systems.
• Medical, dental, vision, prescription, flexible spending, and employee assistance benefits.
• 401(k) with company matching, paid vacation, sick leave, holidays, parental leave, and company-paid disability and life insurance.
• Additional voluntary perks include fitness club contribution, pet insurance, identity theft protection, home and auto insurance discounts, and supplemental life insurance.