Principal Engineer Linux and Virtualization Infrastructure

Principal Engineer Linux and Virtualization Infrastructure

Location: Tampa, Florida

Schedule: Hybrid – 3 days onsite and 2 days remote

Compensation: Up to $175,000 annually, based on experience, plus a short-term incentive plan

Candidates must live within approximately 45 minutes of the Tampa office and be able to commute regularly. This is not a fully remote position.

About the Opportunity

A growing broadband and telecommunications organization is seeking a Principal Engineer, Linux and Virtualization Infrastructure to help design, modernize, and support the infrastructure powering critical business and customer-facing technologies.

This highly visible engineering role supports multiple data centers and enterprise environments. You will lead the architecture, implementation, and optimization of scalable, secure, resilient infrastructure across both greenfield deployments and existing production environments.

What You’ll Do

• Design greenfield data center deployments and modernize existing infrastructure.
• Manage and optimize enterprise Linux, compute, storage, and virtualization platforms.
• Maintain multiple virtualization clusters and lead capacity-planning efforts.
• Research, design, implement, configure, and support new infrastructure technologies.
• Co-manage Fibre Channel, VxLAN, SAN, and NAS environments.
• Design highly available, fault-tolerant, and disaster-recovery solutions.
• Analyze application requirements to determine operating system, storage, memory, CPU, and performance needs.
• Design enterprise storage architectures based on capacity, I/O performance, availability, and recovery requirements.
• Monitor infrastructure platforms and drive recovery and operational improvements.
• Ensure platforms and applications are backed up according to established policies.
• Partner with networking, security, and engineering teams to deliver infrastructure solutions.
• Serve as a senior escalation resource for the NOC and operational teams during complex incidents.
• Maintain technical documentation and support lab and testing environments.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to future infrastructure strategy.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or an equivalent combination of education, training, and experience.
• Seven or more years of Linux systems administration, Linux systems engineering, or related infrastructure experience.
• Advanced Linux and/or Unix administration experience.
• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals and storage-area networks.
• Experience with VMware, Proxmox, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience managing complex infrastructure projects.
• Knowledge of enterprise storage, virtualization, high availability, backup, and disaster recovery.
• Working knowledge of Windows operating systems and Microsoft Office.
• Strong troubleshooting, communication, documentation, and decision-making skills.
• Ability to work independently and collaborate across infrastructure, networking, security, and operational teams.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary up to $175,000 annually, commensurate with experience
• Short-term incentive plan
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) with company match
• Paid time off and company holidays
• Tuition reimbursement
• Employee broadband discounts