Senior Linux System Administrator in Bury

Role Details

Organisation / Team: JD Sports Fashion Plc

Reporting to: Linux Team Lead

Location: Bury Head Office Level 5

Responsibilities

• Support and escalation
• Own customer issues and drive through to resolution
• Act as an escalation point for technical queries from the rest of the team and provide training as required
• Respond to support enquiries from the business and help resolve hardware and/or software problems
• Maintain a high degree of customer service for all queries and adhere to all service management principles
• Liaise and work with other JD technical teams as required
• Liaise with third‑party technical support teams when necessary
• Deputise for the IT Linux Team Lead at meetings when the need arises
• Modernisation and improvement
• Lead OS lifecycle projects: plan, test, and execute major version upgrades across the estate (CentOS / RHEL → AlmaLinux 9)
• Identify, prioritise, and drive technical debt eradication within scripts, packaging, and configuration
• Expand and maintain Ansible playbooks across the estate, establishing standards for configuration management
• Peer review automation scripts, Ansible roles, and RPM packaging work from junior team members
• Provide informal technical mentorship and day‑to‑day guidance to junior Linux administrators
• Proactively identify areas for improvement and drive through to implementation
• Lead development in continual service improvement, project work, and support tooling
• Infrastructure and security
• Manage Linux VM provisioning, configuration, and life cycle in vSphere/VMware
• Administer and extend Zabbix monitoring; contribute to Grafana dashboards and alerting
• Lead and assist with implementation of internal security processes
• Lead and assist with internal patch management processes
• Monitor Change Requests presented to the IT CAB and highlight any Linux‑related concerns
• Maintain awareness of container tooling (Docker/Podman) for test and tooling environments
• Process and governance
• Establish and maintain effective relationships with business users and group IT teams
• Document working procedures and store within the knowledge management database
• Assist ITIL managers in the development and maintenance of IT support processes
• Provide input into root cause analysis documents (RCA)
• Input into weekly team reports; complete weekly management reports when the Linux Team Lead is unavailable

Essential Qualifications

• 5+ years working in a service support environment with exposure to ITIL processes
• Production server administration experience with RHEL 8/9 and AlmaLinux 9, including experience leading major OS version migrations
• Python scripting – primary language for new automation development
• Perl – reading and maintaining legacy scripts in a production environment
• Ansible – authoring and maintaining playbooks and roles in a production environment
• Subversion (SVN) – day‑to‑day version control, branching, and patch management
• RPM packaging – build, version, and deploy custom packages
• vSphere/VMware – VM provisioning, life‑cycle management, and troubleshooting
• Zabbix – monitoring configuration, alerting, and maintenance in a production environment
• Bash scripting and associated tools such as sed, awk, sort, uniq
• Experience of working in an ITIL environment, understanding how end‑to‑end processes work across the organisation
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to effectively identify issues, log, and communicate to other personnel
• Ability to work well under pressure, ensuring a structured approach is maintained at all times

Preferred Qualifications

• Git – working knowledge; experience contributing to SVN‑to‑Git migrations a plus
• Docker or Podman – image build, container runtime troubleshooting
• Grafana – dashboard creation and alerting configuration
• Privileged access management tooling – CyberArk or equivalent (training provided internally)
• Experience mentoring or providing informal technical leadership to junior team members
• Experience in a retail environment
• Experience of application support teams (1st, 2nd, and 3rd line)
• Ability to demonstrate both business and IT benefits where appropriate

Skills & Behaviours

• Incident diagnosis and problem solving within an IT environment
• Excellent interpersonal, communication, and negotiation skills, both verbal and written
• Ability to plan, coordinate, and prioritise different activities
• Ability to liaise with and relate to a broad spectrum of individuals
• Strong customer service ethos with a can‑do mentality
• Good understanding of networking
• Comfortable playing a key role within a team environment
• Flexible approach to the provision of support services to a dynamic, growing business
• Ansible configuration management – can write, review, and maintain production playbooks and roles
• Systematic approach to technical debt – can identify, prioritise, and safely reduce it without breaking existing behaviour
• Peer review and constructive feedback – can critique scripts and automation to a defined standard
• Monitoring and observability mindset – treats visibility as a first‑class concern

Preferable

• Strong desire to learn new skills and keep pace with a modernising estate
• Familiarity with container tooling (Docker/Podman)
• Experience with AI‑assisted tooling in an operational or automation context
• Understanding of business drivers and ability to frame technical work in terms of tangible and intangible benefits

Benefits

• Staff discount on JD Group and other brands within the organisation and personal development opportunities to learn and develop at work.