Infrastructure Engineer - Linux & Data Center

• INFRASTRUCTURE ENGINEER - Linux & Data Center
• Location: San Francisco Bay Area
• Department: Information Technology — Infrastructure Engineering
• Reports To: Infrastructure Engineering Manager
• Employment Type: Full-time
• Experience Level: 2–4 years
• Base Salary: $100,000–$125,000 USD annually
• Travel: Periodic data center and colocation site visits
• On-Call: Participates in a shared infrastructure on-call rotation, with senior escalation support
• Location: San Francisco Bay Area
• Eligibility: U.S. citizenship required

On-site requirement: This role has hands-on data center responsibility and cannot be performed fully remote.

ABOUT RAPIDFORT

RapidFort is a cybersecurity company focused on helping organizations secure and optimize their software supply chain and containerized environments. Our platform helps teams reduce software vulnerabilities and attack surface while improving the security and efficiency of modern cloud-native applications.

We work with commercial enterprises and public-sector organizations operating in highly regulated and security-sensitive environments.

ABOUT THE ROLE

RapidFort Inc. runs its core systems on infrastructure we own and operate. We are looking for an Infrastructure Engineer to help build, automate, and run that estate alongside our senior engineers.

This is a hands-on role with a deliberate weighting:

roughly 70% Linux systems engineering and automation, 30% data center hardware, storage, and network. Most of your week is spent in the Linux environment — building, patching, scripting, and troubleshooting — and a real part of it is spent with your hands on physical infrastructure.

This is a growth role, and we mean that concretely. You will work to standards set by our Infrastructure Engineering Manager and Lead Infrastructure Engineer, with design review and mentorship built into how the team operates. You are not expected to arrive with deep storage or network architecture experience. You are expected to be strong on Linux, genuinely comfortable scripting, and willing to learn the physical side properly rather than treating it as someone else’s job.

We are being specific about the split because it shapes the day. If you want a pure cloud or pure software role, this is not it. If you want to understand infrastructure from the rack up while doing serious automation work, it is a good place to spend a few years.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Linux systems and automation (the majority of your time)
• Build, configure, and harden Linux systems (RHEL/Rocky and Ubuntu) against our defined baselines and images.
• Write and extend automation in Bash and Python for provisioning, remediation, routine reporting, and evidence collection.
• Contribute to our Ansible content — write and maintain roles and playbooks under the team's established standards.
• Execute patching and OS life cycle work: test, stage, roll out, track exceptions, and flag end-of-life systems.
• Troubleshoot Linux issues across CPU, memory, I/O, file system, and systemd, escalating when a problem exceeds your depth.
• Look for repetitive manual work on the team and propose automation for it.
• Data center, hardware, and network
• Execute server hardware tasks: staging and burn-in, racking, cabling, firmware and BIOS updates, out-of-band management, and decommissioning.
• Perform first-line hardware diagnosis and open and track vendor support and RMA cases.
• Carry out day-to-day storage tasks on our SAN/NAS platforms — provisioning, presentation, and capacity monitoring.
• Perform routine hypervisor work: VM provisioning from templates, host patching, and cluster health checks.
• Make data center network changes to established standards — VLANs, switch ports, DNS, DHCP — and troubleshoot connectivity faults.
• Keep asset, IPAM, rack, and topology records accurate. This matters more than it sounds like it does.
• Operations
• Participate in the infrastructure on-call rotation with senior escalation available.
• Execute planned changes during maintenance windows, including writing the change plan and rollback steps.
• Contribute to postmortems and own the remediation items assigned to you.
• Write and improve runbooks and documentation as you learn the environment.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

• Required
• 2–4 years of hands-on experience administering Linux in a production environment.
• Real comfort on the Linux command line — you can diagnose a failing service or a full filesystem without a runbook.
• Working scripting ability in Bash, and enough Python to read, modify, and write straightforward automation.
• Exposure to configuration management (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or similar) and an interest in going deeper.
• Basic networking fundamentals: IP addressing and sub-netting, VLANs, DNS and DHCP, and how to trace a connectivity problem.
• Willingness to do physical work in a data center — racking, cabling, and site visits are part of the job, not an occasional exception.
• Careful, documentation-minded working habits and sound judgment about when to escalate.
• Nice to Have
• Virtualization exposure (LXC, VMware, Hyper-V, Proxmox, or KVM).
• Enterprise storage exposure — SAN or NAS provisioning, or an understanding of multipathing.
• Any production on-call experience under a formal change and incident process.
• Linux or networking certification (RHCSA, Linux+, CCNA) or active progress toward one.
• Exposure to an environment operating under ISO 27001 or SOC 2 Type 2.
• Enough cloud familiarity to hand work off cleanly to our Cloud Operations team — depth is not required.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

By 90 days — you can build, patch, and hand over a standard system independently, you know your way around the racks, and you are shadowing on-call.

By six months — you are taking on-call shifts and handling routine incidents without escalating, and you have automated at least one task the team was doing by hand.

By twelve months — you own a subsystem end to end, your changes go through review without rework, and you are the person a newer engineer asks first.

WHERE THIS LEADS

Our infrastructure team has a defined senior path. The Lead Infrastructure Engineer role above this one carries technical design authority and deputizes for the manager, and the skills it requires are exactly the ones this role develops: deep Linux automation, genuine hardware and network competence, and the judgment to know which decisions are yours. We would rather grow that person than hire them.

WHY THIS ROLE

Genuine ownership. We run our own infrastructure. Decisions about how it is built are made here, not by a provider.

Breadth you cannot get in a cloud-only role. You will learn the stack from power and cabling up through automation, which is increasingly rare and hard to pick up later.

Automation is the mandate, not a side project. Reducing manual work is part of how this role is measured, so you will not be told to stop scripting and go close tickets.

Real mentorship. Design review and senior escalation are built into the team's operating model, not dependent on someone finding time.