Senior Platform Engineer - Ansible, Linux - Odenton, Maryland

Senior Platform Engineer

This company is a software development company that specializes in telecommunications that is trusted worldwide!

Job Description

The successful Platform Engineer will have the following responsibilities within the organization:

• Infrastructure Automation: Author and maintain Ansible playbooks to configure AlmaLinux (CentOS) servers, deploy Docker Compose stacks, manage systemd units, and enforce auditd policies across hundreds of customer sites.
• Remote Troubleshooting & RCA: Own secure SSH-based access patterns (bastion hosts, auditd logs) to diagnose live issues, gather forensic data, and drive rapid root-cause analysis.
• CI/CD & Release Pipelines: Design, build and own end-to-end deployment pipelines with GitLab CI, complete with automated rollbacks, canary releases, and SBOM compliance.
• GitLab Workflow & Release Management: Own the end-to-end GitLab merge-request process to release, enforce semantic version tagging, coordinate release-note creation, and orchestrate smooth, documented releases.
• Observability & Audit: Architect and evolve our telemetry platform-instrumenting servers and services for metrics, logs, and traces. While we currently use Prometheus/Grafana and ELK/Loki, we welcome you to propose and implement any best-in-class tools or frameworks that improve reliability, cost-efficiency, and alert fidelity.
• Platform Tooling: Develop backend services and automation utilities in Python/Flask (or Go) to support orchestration, configuration drift detection, and self-healing routines.
• Reliability & Security: Define meaningful SLOs/SLIs, author and maintain runbooks, lead blameless post-mortems, and enforce kernel-level hardening and compliance across on-prem and cloud.
• Capacity Planning & Cost Optimization: Analyze resource utilization, forecast growth, and recommend scaling strategies or hardware refresh plans to meet customer SLAs.

MPI does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, or based on an individual's status in any group or class protected by applicable federal, state or local law. MPI encourages applications from minorities, women, the disabled, protected veterans and all other qualified applicants.

The Successful Applicant

The successful Platform Engineer will ideally have the following experience:

• 3+ years managing RHEL/CentOS/AlmaLinux in production
• Ansible experience for large-scale orchestration and configuration management.
• Strong proficiency with Linux CLI and Bash scripting for automation at scale.
• Proven track record building and maintaining GitLab CI pipelines (or equivalent) across hybrid environments.
• Hands-on experience with Docker Compose and familiarity with container orchestration (Kubernetes/ECS).
• Proficient in one or more programming languages (Python, Go, etc.) for tooling and services development.
• Solid understanding of observability practices and the ability to evaluate, adopt, or design monitoring solutions tailored to our needs.

Nice to have experience includes:

• Experience with Rust for developing interstitial services
• Security certifications (CIS, CompTIA Linux+, CISSP).

What's on Offer

The successful Platform Engineer will receive:

• A base salary of up to $125k
• 401k match
• A Hybrid Schedule
• Full Benefits (Health, Dental, Vision)
• PTO