Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer - Local to Somerville, MA

Own a real production datacenter end to end. Bare metal you can touch, automation you write, and the authority to make it better.

Why This Role

• You own it. Not a ticket queue, not one slice of someone else's cloud. You're the primary owner of our datacenter environment: ~60 bare-metal servers, ~100 VMs, and a six-rack private colo cage in Somerville, MA.
• Your next chapter is already scoped. A hardware refresh across the fleet, a virtualization platform migration this year, and deeper automation of everything. You'll lead all three.
• Real engineering, not heroics. We run supported, vendor-backed platforms and follow their best practices. Your time goes into automation, reliability, and design, not keeping homegrown tools alive.
• Predictable after-hours. Scheduled after-hours maintenance has historically been 3–5 times a year, and good automation is how we keep it that way.
• Remote, with purpose. Home-based, with on-site days every few weeks for hands-on datacenter work and planning with the team. On-site travel is reimbursed with pre-approval.
• Pay posted up front. $150,000 – $160,000, plus benefits and regular team offsites.

The Opportunity

SinglePoint's compute-heavy backend runs on our own hardware, not someone else's cloud. That backend powers search, analytics, NLP enrichment, and AI summarization for research teams at Fortune 1000 enterprises, and it all depends on the infrastructure you'll own.

You'll keep that environment reliable and secure today, and lead what comes next. You'll sit on our Platform team and work closely with engineering, security, and operations, including the team that runs our customer-facing frontend in AWS.

Our philosophy is to buy platforms rather than build them. Where a supported, vendor-backed product exists, we run it and follow the vendor's best practices instead of maintaining our own substitute. The automation on top of those platforms is very much your work, and we want someone who writes it well and knows how to get the most out of a vendor relationship.

What You'll Own

• The fleet. ~60 HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen9/Gen10 bare-metal servers and ~100 virtual machines running RHEL-family Linux (currently Oracle Linux 9).
• ~50 VMs on VMware, moving to a new platform this year, plus a KVM/libvirt environment running the remaining ~50 VMs, which serve as Kubernetes nodes managed by DevOps.
• Core infrastructure services. BIND, LDAP, mail relay, SFTP, and Foreman.
• The systems product teams depend on. GitLab Self-Managed Premium, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. These are yours at the system level; application and DBA-level tuning stay with the teams that use them.
• Operational tooling. Inventory (NetBox), monitoring (LogicMonitor, Site24x7, Grafana), vulnerability management (Tenable One), automation (Ansible Automation Platform), and backups (Veeam)
• The physical environment. A six-rack private colo cage in Somerville, MA, including spare-parts inventory and hardware lifecycle tracking.
• Routine network operations. Wiring and top-of-rack switch port configuration. Major network reconfiguration and network device patching sit with our network engineering partner.

What You'll Do

• Keep the fleet current and consistent. Patch, harden, and upgrade Linux servers on a controlled cadence through managed repositories and staged rollouts. Install, upgrade, and maintain applications and database servers to vendor guidance, largely through Ansible roles and playbooks you write and the Ansible Automation Platform you operate.
• Run vulnerability management. Scheduled Tenable scans, triage, remediation priorities, patching or documented mitigation, and compliance reporting that stands up to customer security reviews and audits.
• Make backups provable. Own infrastructure backup policy, platform administration, and restore testing, and partner with the application team on disaster recovery planning and exercises.
• Keep monitoring signal, not noise. Complete coverage of the fleet, alerts that fire on real problems and nothing else, and logs you can trust when investigating an incident.
• Lead incident response. Run infrastructure incidents and post-incident reviews, drive corrective actions to closure, and keep SOPs, runbooks, and diagrams clear to technical and non-technical readers alike.
• Run the datacenter remotely. Accurate NetBox records, labeled cabling, iLO/out-of-band access to everything, spare parts on the shelf, and clear work orders for remote hands.
• Manage vendors and capacity. Work with vendors and our colo provider on hardware lifecycle and capacity, and coordinate maintenance windows and network changes with our network partner.

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 days: Revise DNS and SMTP deployments and redeploy w/o load balancers
• First 90 days: Backup and DR strategy reconsidered. Backup and DR tool set revised, deployed and tested with a real restore.
• In one year or less: Full patch and vulnerability cycle end to end. The hardware refresh is underway; alerts mean something, and the environment is more automated and better documented than you found it.

What We're Looking For

• Production Linux depth. Typically 7+ years of production Linux systems engineering, including several years accountable for the reliability and security of an environment, alone or as a senior member of a small team. A BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Information Technology is a plus, but practical experience matters more to us.
• RHEL-family expertise. RHEL, Oracle Linux, Rocky, Alma, or CentOS: systemd, kernel and performance tuning, storage (LVM, RAID, NFS), and networking (bonding, VLANs, firewalld/iptables).
• Virtualization in production. VMware vSphere, KVM/libvirt, OpenShift Virtualization, Proxmox, Hyper-V, or similar.
• Real Ansible authoring. You've written and maintained roles and playbooks, not only run them.
• Patch and vulnerability management. Scheduled scanning with Tenable/Nessus, Qualys, Rapid7, or similar, interpreting results, and driving remediation across a fleet.
• System-level application and database operations. Packaging, storage, TLS, access control, and backups from vendor documentation, plus the judgment to plan a database upgrade that can be rolled back and to treat a backup as unproven until it's been restored.
• Enterprise hardware. HPE ProLiant or equivalent: iLO/IPMI, firmware, diagnostics, component replacement, and comfort with occasional physical work in a datacenter.
• High availability and incident leadership. You've designed or materially improved redundant infrastructure, led incident response, and written root-cause analyses people actually learned from.
• Solid networking fundamentals. Enough to make routine switch changes yourself, and to diagnose and scope switch, firewall, and load-balancer issues well enough to hand them to network engineers.
• Clear communication. Strong documentation habits and clear written and spoken communication.
  
  

Experience with the specific products named above is a plus, not a requirement. We expect a strong engineer to pick them up here. Don't check every box? Apply anyway.

Our Values, and What They Look Like in This Role

Our five core values aren't wall art. They shape how we work together, and they're part of how every person here is reviewed.

• Integrity. Do what you say you will do and see commitments through. Here, that means a patch isn't done until it's verified, and a backup isn't real until it's been restored.
• Innovation. Keep looking for new ideas, technologies, and approaches that wow our customers and ourselves. Here, that means automating what used to be manual and leaving the environment smarter than you found it.
• Energy. Bring enthusiasm that energizes others, and collaborate across teams toward shared goals. You'll partner closely with engineering, security, DevOps, and our vendors.
• Excellence. Raise the bar on quality in everything we deliver. Clean NetBox records, labeled cables, quiet alerts, and runbooks anyone can follow.
• Transparency. Communicate openly about decisions, challenges, and direction, and own your mistakes. You run post-incident reviews focused on learning, not blame.

Job Details

Job Type: Full-Time
Location: Hybrid in the Boston, MA area, at least two days a week at our Somerville office and datacenter. Eastern Time working hours. Our office is located at Assembly Row, just off the Orange Line.
Datacenter work: You decide how much of it you do yourself. The colo offers a remote-hands service that can handle routine tasks such as drive and component swaps, cabling, and receiving shipments, provided the planning, documentation, and work orders behind them are in good order. When you do work in the cage yourself, expect elevated noise levels and variable temperatures.
Work authorization requirements: Must be authorized to work in the United States (unfortunately, we cannot sponsor visas).

Benefits

• 401(k) with company match
• Medical, vision, and dental coverage along with PFML, Disability and Life Insurance
• Flexible Vacation, 14 Holidays, Sick Leave, and a day off for your Birthday
• Training and certification budget

About Northern Light

For over 25 years, Northern Light has helped Fortune 1000 enterprises make smarter, faster, and more informed decisions through SinglePoint, our award-winning, machine learning-powered market and competitive intelligence platform. SinglePoint combines content licensed from a wide range of publishers and research vendors with each customer's own internal documents, then enriches, indexes, and serves it through a customer-specific portal with search, analytics, NLP enrichment, and AI summarization and Q&A. Our clients include global leaders across technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences.

Why Join Northern Light

• Join a company shaping the future of competitive and market intelligence.
• Work with a collaborative, high-performing team that values creativity, experimentation, and measurable results.
• Competitive salary, benefits, and professional growth opportunities.
• Own a real production environment end to end, on supported enterprise platforms with vendor backing.
• Regular team offsites and opportunities for cross-functional collaboration.

Working at Northern Light

Northern Light is based in the Boston, MA area. Northern Light is proud to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. Northern Light SinglePoint, LLC participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with Form I-9 information to confirm employment eligibility for all new hires. For more information, visit www.e-verify.gov.

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.