Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer

About the role

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 RabbitMQ 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, CheckMK, 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.