Senior Linux Administrator

Senior Linux Administrator at Riverlane, Cambridge, UK. A senior-level full time position in the IT team, listed under software engineering.

T he salary range for this role is broad, as we are able to consider varying levels of experience. Any offer made will carefully take into account level of experience (including relevant industry experience), transferable relevant skills and previous relevant achievements.

About the role

Riverlane is looking for an experienced Linux administrator to own and grow our core computational infrastructure. This is a hands-on role combining day-to-day administration of our High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment with longer-term planning, automation, and improvement of our infrastructure estate.

You'll be the primary owner of our HPC cluster and core Linux infrastructure, working closely with IT management and wider Infrastructure Team to keep systems reliable today while building towards a more resilient, scalable environment for tomorrow.

HPC Cluster Administration

• Administer and maintain the HPC cluster, including compute nodes, storage systems, and networking.
• Evaluate and evolve cluster topology, compute node configuration, and hardware resource utilisation as the estate grows.
• Lead the deployment, configuration, and troubleshooting of HPC tooling, particularly Slurm — including queue structures and job scheduling policies.
• Monitor system performance and ensure high availability of HPC resources, using observability tools such as Prometheus; investigate anomalies and outages.
• Assess and maintain the network file storage solution for throughput, scalability, and latency.

Business As Usual (BAU) Administration

• Maintain, patch, and troubleshoot core Linux infrastructure (RHEL).
• Act as an escalation point for complex technical issues raised by the Riverlane team.
• Provide operational upkeep of core infrastructure, including servers, tooling, and licence managers.
• Maintain Synopsys EDA tooling, including licence server management, environment configuration, and performance optimisation for electronic design automation workflows.

Requirements

• Extensive experience administering and growing infrastructure in fast-paced engineering environments.
• Enterprise Linux expertise: deep knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) administration, security hardening, lifecycle management, and troubleshooting.
• Hands-on experience configuring, scaling, tuning, and troubleshooting job schedulers (e.g. Slurm) and distributed compute environments.
• Strong understanding of network file storage protocols and network optimisation for computational workloads.
• Proficient with container environments and virtualisation infrastructure.
• High proficiency with infrastructure automation tools (Ansible, Python, Bash) and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Experience with backup and disaster recovery strategy and implementation.
• Experience managing licensed EDA or similar specialist software tooling (e.g. Synopsys) is a strong plus.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to support both technical and non-technical users and translate complex issues into clear guidance.