Senior Linux & Infrastructure Automation Engineer at RRD in Chicago, IL, United States

Job description

• The Senior Linux & Infrastructure Automation Engineer is responsible for engineering, scaling, and maintaining the underlying Valassis DMT platform environment. This individual contributor role focuses heavily on hands-on systems engineering, robust configuration management, and high-availability cloud infrastructure execution across hybrid environments, spanning bare-metal servers, collocations, and cloud architectures. The position requires deep expertise in Linux systems administration, advanced automation using Puppet and Ansible, and experience deploying and operating OpenStack environments.

Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Automation & Configuration Management: Design, develop, and maintain declarative configuration modules using Puppet and Ansible to automate system provisioning, application deployment, and continuous compliance across bare-metal and virtualized nodes.
• Linux Systems Engineering: Administer, tune, and troubleshoot enterprise Linux environments (primarily Ubuntu) for optimal performance, kernel optimization, security hardening, and maximum uptime.
• Cloud & Virtualization Operations: Operate and optimize virtualization and hypervisor layers (including OpenStack, LXD, KVM, and ESXi lifecycles) and drive automated bare-metal server provisioning.
• Storage & Infrastructure Maintenance: Administer and maintain persistent storage infrastructure alongside physical SAN equipment (PureStorage or enterprise S3-compatible targets).
• Technical Execution & Migrations: Actively execute platform refreshes, legacy environment decommissionings, and infrastructure migrations across datacenter footprints.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related engineering discipline, or equivalent professional work experience.
• Minimum of 5–7+ years of progressive hands-on experience in Linux infrastructure engineering, systems administration, and cloud infrastructure automation.
• Linux Administration - Expert-level, hands-on experience engineering, hardening, and maintaining enterprise Ubuntu/Debian server environments.
• Automation & CM - Proven mastery authoring custom Puppet modules and Ansible playbooks/roles to automate configuration, orchestration, and system management at scale.
• Orchestration & Virtualization -Strong foundational background in bare-metal provisioning concepts and hypervisor/container runtimes (KVM, LXD, ESXi).
• Storage Fundamentals -Solid understanding of enterprise storage architectures, including SAN/NAS devices, block/object storage concepts, and volume management.
• Identity & Security -Working knowledge of cross-platform Active Directory integration, enterprise PKI/certificate enrollment, and domain identity services.
• OpenStack Operations: Hands-on experience configuring, troubleshooting, and maintaining production OpenStack deployments (Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Keystone).
• Scale-Out Storage (Ceph): Direct experience configuring, operating, or maintaining Ceph storage clusters.
• Bare-Metal Provisioning Tools (MAAS): Hands-on experience with Canonical MAAS or similar automated bare-metal provisioning platforms.
• MicroCloud & Edge Frameworks: Familiarity with MicroCloud deployment and lightweight cloud infrastructure environments.

Skills

Required

• Linux Administration
• Puppet
• Ansible
• OpenStack
• LXD
• KVM
• ESXi
• SAN/NAS
• Ceph
• MAAS
• MicroCloud
• Active Directory

Benefits

• RRD's current salary range for this role is $91,800 to $146,800 / year. The salary range may be adjusted based on the applicable geographic location of the hired employee, and the range may change in the future. At RRD, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions may vary based upon, but not limited to education, skills, experience, proficiency, performance, shift and location. Depending on the role, in addition to base salary, the total compensation package may also include participation in a bonus, commission or incentive program. RRD’s benefit offerings include medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, disability insurance, 401(k) with company match, life insurance and other voluntary supplemental insurance coverages, plus parental leave, adoption assistance, tuition assistance and employer/partner discounts.