Linux Systems Administrator (12 month contract)

Are you a Linux expert who wants your work to mean more than simply maintaining uptime? Our client is a not-for-profit organization that builds and supports the digital infrastructure used by Alberta’s researchers, educators, and innovators. They are seeking a purpose-driven Systems Administrator to help manage a unique hybrid environment, ranging from bare-metal OpenStack clusters to advanced public cloud integrations.

Our client’s mission is to improve the lives of Albertans through the use and advancement of digital technologies. They support organizations across Alberta’s education, enterprise, research, and government sectors through a range of technology services. Most recently, our client established a regional Security Operations Centre to help monitor, detect, and respond to cybersecurity threats targeting Alberta’s post-secondary institutions.

What You’ll Do

• Engineer R&E platforms: Take a hands-on role in deploying and managing the systems that underpin Alberta’s research and education community, including public clouds, regional security tools, and collaborative data environments.
• End-to-end infrastructure: Manage the full hardware-to-software lifecycle, from physical hardware maintenance to scaling environments via Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Modernize operations: Collaborate on best practices for Kubernetes, Prometheus monitoring, and automated configuration management (Ansible/Puppet).
• Support the community: Provide technical "Tier 3" style support for our member organizations in the public and education sectors, helping them integrate their systems with our public cloud and logging tools.
• Be part of an on call rotation: For applicable projects, our client offers a compensated on call rotation.

• Open to both Intermediate (2-5 year of exp) and Senior (5-10 years of experience) candidates
• The essentials: Solid Linux knowledge (you know your way around the kernel and shell), comfort with virtualization/containers, and a "tinkerer" mindset for hardware troubleshooting.
• System observability: A strong grasp of monitoring and alerting philosophy. You understand how to gain visibility into complex systems using metrics, logs, and traces (using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Clickhouse and Zabbix).
• Hybrid & multi-cloud infrastructure: Experience with managing diverse compute environments. You are comfortable navigating the nuances of private cloud orchestration (OpenStack) alongside public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Data telemetry & log management: An interest in building robust pipelines for system data. You understand how to ingest, transform, and route high-volume logs and event streams (leveraging technologies like Vector, FluentD, or Kafka).