Senior Infrastructure Engineer - AIX & Linux | 1060710

Our Columbus, Ohio client is growing their infrastructure team and has a contract-to-hire opportunity for a Senior Infrastructure Engineer - AIX & Linux who is hungry to own their platform and drive real change. As the Senior Infrastructure Engineer for AIX and Linux, you'll set the direction for UNIX/Linux compute at enterprise scale, build automation that genuinely eliminates toil, and bring hybrid cloud instincts to a team that's actively modernizing.

You'll own reliability, security, and performance across AIX, Linux, VMware, storage, and DR-partnering closely with Security, AppDev, Data, and Networking. If you love deep-dive performance troubleshooting, have strong opinions about platform standards, and get excited about what modern tooling can do for infrastructure operations, this role was built for you., AIX, Linux, and platform lifecycle

• Lead lifecycle management for AIX (LPARs, VIO, NIM) and Linux (RHEL/SLES/Ubuntu): provisioning, patching, kernel updates, tuning, and OS hardening.
• Maintain platform standards: golden images, baselines, and configuration drift detection.
• Tune OS and kernel parameters, multipathing, and I/O stacks for latency-sensitive workloads.

Virtualization, storage, and hybrid cloud

• Administer and optimize VMware vSphere (ESXi, vCenter, DRS/HA, vMotion), HMC, and shared storage patterns including vSAN or enterprise arrays.
• Operate hybrid IaaS/PaaS workloads in AWS/Azure: compute, storage, networking, identity integrations; apply landing zones and guardrails.
• Enforce configuration management with Ansible, Terraform, and Git-based pipelines for repeatable deployments.

Service optimization and cost management

• Analyze utilization and recommend rightsizing, reservations or savings plans, storage tiering, and archival strategies.
• Automate to eliminate toil: scheduled automation, self-healing playbooks, autoscaling where appropriate.
• Track and report cloud spend and data center TCO; propose optimizations and lifecycle retirements.
• Standardize images and baselines to reduce variance and operational overhead.

Security, compliance, and risk management

• Apply CIS benchmarks and vendor hardening guides for AIX, Linux, VMware, and cloud workloads; meet patch and vulnerability SLAs.
• Integrate IAM and RBAC patterns across on-premises and cloud; enforce MFA, least privilege, and key rotation.
• Implement encryption in transit and at rest, certificate lifecycle, and secrets management (for example HashiCorp Vault, cloud KMS).
• Design, test, and exercise BC/DR runbooks including multi-site failover and restore validation.

Technical leadership, observability, and capacity

• Provide architectural guidance on AIX/Linux modernization, VMware consolidation, storage rationalization, and cloud adoption.
• Evaluate new tools through pilots and structured production onboarding.
• Build observability across metrics, logs, and traces (for example Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, SolarWinds).
• Forecast compute, memory, network, and storage growth; drive procurement and expansion planning.

Documentation, reporting, and collaboration

• Maintain architectural diagrams, runbooks, service catalogs, and CMDB or asset records.
• Produce operational health, capacity, and cost dashboards; communicate risk registers and remediation.
• Document incidents, RCAs, lessons learned, and onboarding guides.
• Partner with Security, AppDev, Data, and Networking; coordinate vendors and MSPs to SLOs.
• Champion AIX-to-Linux modernization and cloud migration pathways; own the platform rationalization roadmap and drive lifecycle retirements proactively. Champion reliability, automation, and continuous improvement as cultural defaults, not afterthoughts.

Leveraging AI for UNIX, Linux, and infrastructure automation Dense OS logs, long Ansible/Terraform modules, and repetitive incident patterns are exactly where AI earns its keep. We use enterprise-approved tooling to move faster without cutting corners-and we expect senior engineers to lead by example.

• Turn walls of sar, iostat, vmstat, and AIX perf output into ranked diagnostic hypotheses in minutes rather than hours-then validate and act with your own judgment before any change.
• Accelerate Ansible playbooks, Terraform modules, and pipeline scaffolding with AI coding assistants-ship faster with peer review, linting, and controlled rollout, not slower with approval theater.
• Compress long incident threads and RCAs into crisp executive summaries and durable knowledge articles that engineers actually reference.
• Assist with documentation of complex multipathing, clustering (PowerHA, Pacemaker), and DR drills from structured inputs and SME review.
• Where available, use enterprise AIOps or log intelligence features to reduce alert noise and surface anomalies alongside traditional SRE practices.

• 10+ years administering UNIX/Linux platforms
• 7+ years managing VMware vSphere in production, * 10+ years administering UNIX/Linux platforms, including AIX (LPAR/VIOS/NIM) and enterprise Linux (RHEL/SLES/Ubuntu).
• 7+ years managing VMware vSphere in production (HA/DRS, Lifecycle Manager, clusters at scale).
• 5+ years managing enterprise storage (FC/iSCSI/NFS), snapshots, replication, and performance troubleshooting.
• Hands-on automation with Ansible, scripting (Bash, Python), and Terraform for hybrid infrastructure.

Expert skills

• AIX: LPAR/VIOS architecture, NIM provisioning, mksysb and cloning, SEA/NPIV, LPM, ODM and device management, OS tuning, troubleshooting.
• Linux: kernel parameters (sysctl), systemd, SELinux or AppArmor, multipathd, LVM, filesystems (ext4, xfs), kdump, performance tooling (perf, sar, iostat).
• Security and compliance: CIS-style hardening, patch orchestration, vulnerability workflows, privileged access, encryption, audit evidence.

Advanced skills

• Advanced AIX: POWER system architecture and LPAR density optimization, NIM automation at scale, TL/SP upgrade orchestration across large environments-building on but going beyond day-to-day LPAR administration.
• Strong AIX/Linux storage: multipathing, SAN/NAS integration, filesystem tuning, I/O optimization.
• High availability: PowerHA, Pacemaker and Corosync, clustering, quorum, failover and runbook validation.
• Security automation: SSH, sudo, PAM, audit frameworks, configuration enforcement.
• Deep performance analysis: CPU, memory, I/O, and network bottlenecks with advanced OS diagnostics.
• Familiarity with container platforms (RHEL OpenShift, Kubernetes) and GitOps patterns as the Linux estate evolves is a plus. Experience with enterprise-approved AI coding assistants and structured log analysis tooling in regulated environments is also valued.