Manager, Linux Platform

Our client is seeking an experienced Manager, Linux Platform to lead a team of Linux System Engineers and Administrators responsible for supporting and modernizing enterprise infrastructure across corporate and distribution center environments.

This is a hands-on leadership role for a seasoned technology manager who can balance people leadership, operational excellence, and technical strategy. The ideal candidate will bring deep Linux expertise, strong Azure cloud experience, and a proven track record of leading teams through operational and technical transformation.

You will be responsible for managing a team of 5-9 engineers and administrators, driving automation and modernization initiatives, ensuring platform reliability and security, and serving as the senior escalation point for critical production issues.

Key Responsibilities

Leadership & Team Development

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of 5-9 System Engineers and Administrators, including both full-time employees and consultants.
• Establish clear goals, performance expectations, and accountability measures.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, technical excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Drive organizational and operational change initiatives to improve team effectiveness and platform maturity.
• Manage workload prioritization, resource planning, succession planning, and on-call rotations.
• Partner with vendors and service providers to ensure service quality and SLA compliance.
• Collaborate with Finance and Procurement to manage budgets, licensing, renewals, vendor contracts, and cloud spend.

Linux Platform Engineering & Operations

• Oversee the administration, configuration, patching, maintenance, and optimization of enterprise Linux environments, including RHEL and SUSE.
• Lead infrastructure modernization efforts across on-premises and cloud platforms.
• Drive automation using Ansible, Terraform, Bash scripting, and CI/CD tools.
• Support cloud-native technologies, containers, platform services, and infrastructure-as-code initiatives.
• Serve as the primary escalation point for complex production incidents and critical outages.
• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) efforts and implement permanent corrective actions.
• Manage platform lifecycle planning, capacity management, and technology upgrades.
• Oversee enterprise backup, recovery, storage, NAS, and SAN environments.

Security, Compliance & Governance

• Ensure compliance with SOX, PCI-DSS, and internal security standards.
• Manage access controls, auditing, encryption, vulnerability remediation, and security best practices.
• Maintain accurate technical documentation, architecture diagrams, operational procedures, and support runbooks.

Operational Excellence

• Ensure platform availability, resilience, and performance across mission-critical environments.
• Lead disaster recovery planning, testing, and business continuity initiatives.
• Drive observability, monitoring, and proactive issue prevention.
• Support 24x7 operational environments with defined service-level objectives and response processes.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related discipline, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience supporting enterprise Linux environments, including RHEL and/or SUSE.
• 3+ years of people leadership experience managing System Engineers, Platform Engineers, Infrastructure Engineers, or DevOps teams.
• Demonstrated success leading teams through operational or technology transformation initiatives.
• Strong experience with Microsoft Azure cloud services and hybrid infrastructure environments.
• Deep expertise in Linux administration, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and system optimization.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure automation and configuration management tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, or similar technologies.
• Experience supporting virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere.
• Strong understanding of networking protocols and services including TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, NTP, VPN, and load balancing technologies.
• Experience with monitoring and observability platforms such as Datadog, Dynatrace, Nagios, SolarWinds, or equivalent.
• Knowledge of enterprise backup and recovery solutions including Veeam, Rubrik, or NetBackup.
• Experience supporting highly available, 24x7 production environments.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to engage technical and executive audiences., * Experience within retail, distribution, logistics, or other high-volume transactional environments.
• Experience with containers, Kubernetes, serverless technologies, and cloud modernization programs.
• Familiarity with databases and middleware platforms.
• ITIL certification or practical knowledge of Incident, Problem, Change, and Service Management processes.
• Experience managing compliance-driven environments subject to SOX and PCI requirements.