Linux Engineer - Secure - on-site Hampshire in England

Role Summary

The ITO Linux Engineer (Level 3) is the Linux technical authority across DXC-managed customer environments, accountable for platform integrity, complex troubleshooting, performance optimisation and architectural improvements for mission-critical workloads.

They design, validate and maintain secure OS baselines and oversee patching and vulnerability management to ensure stability, security, performance and audit readiness in regulated environments.

They own major Linux incidents and root-cause analysis, advising on clustering, high availability, disaster recovery configurations, kernel tuning, storage integrations and network dependencies.

They automate operations using advanced shell scripting and infrastructure-as-code, approve high-risk changes following review, and mentor junior engineers to build capability and consistency.

Bridging operations and engineering, they support lifecycle planning, platform modernisation and integration with automation, monitoring and configuration management tools.

They partner with security and compliance teams to enforce enterprise hardening standards and maintain audit-ready documentation and evidence.

The role demands deep technical expertise, architectural judgement and calm, authoritative decision-making under pressure in regulated, mission-critical environments.

Due to the nature of the work and the customers we support, the successful candidate must be eligible to meet UK Government and contractual personnel security requirements, including the applicable residency requirements for the role, and have the right to work in the United Kingdom.

Some roles may also be subject to nationality requirements where these are necessary to meet UK Government or contractual security obligations.

Please note the roles will require attendance on-site in Hampshire 5 days a week.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead Linux capacity planning from CPU, memory, disk, I/O, swap and network trends, recommending scaling, consolidation or platform refresh.
• Define and regularly review secure RHEL, Cent OS, Oracle Linux and SUSE baselines aligned with CIS, STIGs or equivalent standards.
• Plan patching and vulnerability cycles, including sequencing, risk assessment and rollback, to maintain service continuity within constrained change windows.
• Identify end-of-life distributions, kernels and dependencies and recommend upgrades or migrations to maintain supportability and compliance.
• Maintain accurate Linux CMDB records and configuration management discipline across operations and changes.
• Analyse incidents, performance data and vulnerability scans to identify systemic weaknesses and improvement opportunities.
• Own root-cause analysis for major and recurring incidents, implementing corrective actions and embedding prevention in procedures and baselines.
• Automate repetitive tasks with advanced shell scripting, Ansible, Puppet or equivalent tools to improve consistency, accuracy and efficiency.
• Update runbooks, procedures and knowledge articles with current practice, known errors and lessons learned.
• Evaluate containerisation, immutable infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code, recommending adoption where reliability, security or efficiency improves.
• Lead or support platform modernisation aligned with organisational strategy and industry best practice.
• Advise customers, service delivery, security and compliance stakeholders in service reviews, governance forums and risk discussions.
• Partner with security teams to enforce hardening standards, deliver prioritised vulnerability remediation and maintain audit evidence.
• Coordinate with application, database, network, storage and virtualisation teams on Linux dependencies affecting performance, connectivity and high availability.
• Lead major-incident technical bridges, updating incident managers and stakeholders on root cause, impact and recovery.
• Mentor junior engineers through technical guidance, work reviews, knowledge sharing and structured development.
• Design, validate and maintain secure OS baselines and repeatable, auditable builds that meet regulatory and contractual requirements.
• Review high-risk kernel, clustering, storage and baseline changes, assessing risk and giving technical approval before CAB submission.
• Design, test and document clustering and HA using Pacemaker, Corosync, DRBD, Oracle RAC dependencies and application-level clustering, including failover.
• Design and oversee enterprise storage integration across Fibre Channel, i SCSI, DM-Multipath, NFS and GFS2/OCFS2 shared storage.
• Support OS upgrades, distribution migrations and the transition to automation, monitoring and configuration management tools.
• Maintain build templates, Kickstart/Auto Ya ST configurations and post-installation automation for consistent, hardened, audit-ready provisioning from first boot.
• Develop Bash/Python scripts, Ansible playbooks, Puppet manifests or equivalent infrastructure-as-code for configuration, compliance, patch orchestration and