Senior Engineer Infrastructure Operations Linux

Senior Infrastructure Engineer – Linux SME PAYE: £469.98/day Umbrella: £602.83/day Contract: 6 months initially Inside IR35 Location: Milton Keynes (Hybrid – minimum 60% onsite) We are supporting a highly secure government organisation delivering mission-critical infrastructure services across sensitive UK platforms. An opportunity has arisen for an experienced Senior Infrastructure Engineer / Linux SME to join a specialist infrastructure operations team supporting secure enterprise environments. This is a hands-on engineering role suited to candidates with deep Linux systems administration experience gained within complex enterprise or government environments. The Role You will be responsible for supporting, maintaining and improving secure Linux infrastructure platforms across both BAU operations and project delivery. The role will involve: * Enterprise Linux administration and troubleshooting * Supporting secure, highly available production environments * Platform performance, stability and security management * Infrastructure automation and environment improvement * Supporting Linux-based development environments * Containerisation of applications and services * Working alongside infrastructure, network and security teams * Incident resolution and root cause analysis * Maintaining operational standards and technical documentation * Supporting modern deployment approaches within secure environments * Required Experience Candidates should demonstrate strong experience in: * Enterprise Linux administration (RHEL/CentOS/Rocky Linux) * Secure production infrastructure support * Linux troubleshooting and performance tuning * Automation tools such as Ansible, Bash or Python * VMware virtualised environments * Container technologies (Docker/Podman/Kubernetes beneficial) * Infrastructure monitoring and operational support * Working within ITIL/service management environments * Supporting infrastructure within regulated or secure organisations * Highly Desirable * Red Hat Satellite * CI/CD exposure * Infrastructure as Code concepts * Security hardening and patch management * Experience within Government, Defence, Banking or other highly regulated environments * Certifications (Desirable) One or more of: RHCSA RHCE LFCS LPIC-1 / LPIC-2 IMPORTANT – Security Eligibility Due to the nature of the work, candidates MUST: * Be a SOLE British National (dual nationality cannot be considered) * Have lived in the UK for at least 2 of the last 5 years * Be eligible to obtain SC Clearance Current SC Clearance is advantageous but not essential. This is an excellent opportunity to work within a nationally significant secure infrastructure environment supporting critical government services