--- title: 'Senior Linux Systems Administrator at RapidFort, Inc.' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-linux-systems-administrator-rapidfort-inc-united-states-wcdxngrd69vd' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-06' --- # Senior Linux Systems Administrator at RapidFort, Inc. - **Company:** RapidFort, Inc. - **Location:** United States - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-11-03 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/rapidfortinc/jobs/4478105009 ## Job description Location: Remote — United States Department: Information Technology — Infrastructure Engineering Reports to: Infrastructure Engineering Manager Employment Type: Full-time, individual contributor Experience: 8+ years of relevant hands-on experience Base Salary: $125,000–$165,000 annually, plus equity and benefits Eligibility: U.S. citizenship required Senior Linux Systems Administrator RapidFort, Infrastructure ======================================================================= ## ABOUT RAPIDFORT --------------- RapidFort helps enterprises and government organizations reduce software supply-chain risk through hardened container images, runtime-based attack surface reduction, and automated vulnerability remediation. We own and operate the infrastructure that supports our engineering teams and core systems. ## ABOUT THE ROLE -------------- RapidFort is looking for a senior Linux systems administrator to own and run its infrastructure: bare-metal Linux servers in data centers, the virtual machines and containers that run on them, the networks that connect them to each other and to our staff, self-hosted development services such as GitLab and CI, and our resources in AWS. You will keep these systems reliable, secure and documented, plan and carry out changes to them, and lead the response when something breaks. This is a hands-on senior individual-contributor role with direct responsibility for technical execution. We need someone whose knowledge runs from disks and kernels up to routing tables, firewalls and DNS. ## RESPONSIBILITIES ---------------- Linux systems administration - Build, configure, administer and harden Linux systems: installation, system services, packages, users, permissions, authentication and access control. - Operate a fleet of remotely managed physical Linux servers and the virtual machines and containers on them: storage, capacity planning and hardware replacement. - Own the operating-system lifecycle: patch testing, staged deployment, operating-system and kernel upgrades, tracking exceptions, and moving systems off releases that reach end of life. - Keep configurations consistent, and find and correct configuration drift. Networks, cloud and development services - Design, run and troubleshoot the network: routing, traffic shaping, firewalls, DHCP and DNS, and the overlay network that connects the data centers, the cloud and remote staff. - Manage our resources in AWS, mainly EC2 and S3. - Run the self-hosted development services, including GitLab, CI runners, build machines and package mirrors. Troubleshooting and incident ownership - Independently diagnose production problems involving CPU, memory, disk I/O, filesystems, systemd, networking and service dependencies, such as failed services, boot problems, resource exhaustion, package conflicts and intermittent performance issues. - Use logs, metrics and command-line tools to find root causes and to confirm that a fix worked. - Monitor the systems, and improve monitoring and alerting so that problems are caught early without needless noise. - Lead incident response, contribute to incident reviews, and complete the corrective actions that keep a problem from recurring. - Work with developers, IT, data-center staff and hardware vendors when a problem crosses system boundaries. - Escalate when needed, with clear findings, the supporting evidence, and a record of the troubleshooting already done. Automation and configuration management - Write, debug and maintain Bash scripts for provisioning, diagnostics, remediation, reporting and routine operations, and Python automation where it makes operational work more reliable or simpler. - Write and maintain Ansible roles and playbooks to the team's standards. - Replace repetitive manual tasks with reliable, maintainable automation. - Keep configuration and automation in git, test changes, and make changes through merge requests, review and automated deployment rather than by editing live systems. Security and operational reliability - Own access control and security: SSH keys and hardware security keys, network access policies, least privilege, security baselines, timely patching, vulnerability scanning, audits of exposed services, and software supply-chain risk. - Run the backups and prove that they restore. - Plan changes and maintenance with a written procedure that gives the steps, how to check the result, and a way back. - Write and maintain documentation, including runbooks, configuration records and troubleshooting notes, and review other engineers' changes. - Take part in a shared on-call rotation and in scheduled maintenance windows. ## REQUIRED EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS ------------------------------ Typically eight or more years administering Linux servers in production with root responsibility, including physical hardware and not only cloud instances, with recent hands-on responsibility for operations and troubleshooting. Solid working knowledge of most of the following. Linux systems - Linux processes, services, users and permissions, package management, filesystems and logging, in depth. - Strong experience with Debian and other Linux distributions. - Boot and kernel: UEFI, GRUB, initramfs, kernel configuration and building, kernel modules (including DKMS) and sysctl. - Resource control and diagnosis: cgroups v2, memory management and the out-of-memory killer, pressure-stall information (PSI), and tools such as strace, perf, iostat, ss and /proc. - Both systemd and sysvinit. Networking - TCP/IP fundamentals: IPv4 and IPv6, subnetting, bridges, VLANs, bonding and NAT, and troubleshooting connectivity. - Linux routing: multiple routing tables, policy routing with ip rule, source-based routing, and routing between sites. - Traffic shaping with tc: queueing disciplines (HTB, fq_codel, cake), classification with tc filters or firewall marks, and ingress shaping through ifb. - nftables, including sets, maps and connection tracking, and enough iptables to read and migrate older rule sets. - DNS and DHCP: unbound as a validating recursive resolver with local zones and forwarding, dnsmasq for DHCP and local DNS, split-horizon DNS, and debugging name resolution with dig. - WireGuard, and NetBird or a similar WireGuard-based overlay network such as Tailscale or Headscale: peers, groups, access policies, routing peers for subnets, and DNS. Experience self-hosting the control plane is a plus. - Reading packet captures with tcpdump or Wireshark. Storage - ZFS in depth: pool layout, datasets and zvols, snapshots, send and receive, scrubs and resilvering, ARC tuning, and recovering a degraded or damaged pool. - mdadm RAID, LVM, ext4 and XFS, filesystem repair, SSD caching such as bcache or dm-cache, and handling failing disks (SMART, NVMe health). Virtualization and containers - KVM/QEMU or Xen, LXC and Docker, and enough Kubernetes to debug a cluster. Monitoring and backups - Monitoring and alerting, and backup and recovery, including testing that restores work. AWS - EC2: instances, images, security groups, EBS, instance profiles and the instance metadata service (IMDSv2). - S3: bucket policies, versioning, lifecycle rules and encryption. - IAM roles and policies written to the principle of least privilege. Git, GitLab, GitOps and configuration management - Expert git: branching, merging and conflict resolution in a merge-request workflow, without rewriting or destroying history. - GitLab administration: a self-hosted installation and its upgrades, groups, projects and permissions, protected branches, approval rules, and CI/CD pipelines and runners. - GitOps and infrastructure as code: configuration that lives in git and is applied automatically after review, drift detection, and OpenTofu or Terraform. - Writing and maintaining Ansible roles and playbooks, or substantial experience with a comparable configuration-management tool. Security - Host hardening, least privilege, firewall design, and finding and closing services that are exposed by mistake. - SSH in depth: sshd configuration, SSH certificates, and FIDO2 hardware keys such as YubiKeys. GPG signing and verification. - TLS certificates and their renewal, and safe handling of secrets. - Patch management, vulnerability scanning, software supply-chain risk, and investigating incidents from logs. Scripting - Expert Bash: robust scripts with sound error handling, quoting, traps, and commands run over SSH, which you can write, troubleshoot and maintain in production on your own. - Good working Python for systems automation and operational tooling. Judgment and communication - A record of personally resolving complex technical problems and following through on the corrective actions. - Sound judgment about change risk, testing, rollback and escalation. - Clear, precise written English for change plans, incident reports, reviews, tickets and documentation. - The ability to work independently within a remote team. ## PREFERRED --------- - Server hardware: IPMI, iDRAC, iLO and other BMC consoles, RAID and HBA controllers, and firmware updates. - Diagnosing PCIe devices and their drivers and firmware from kernel logs. - Physical data-center work, and working with data-center remote hands. - GPU servers, NVIDIA drivers and CUDA environments, and infrastructure for AI workloads. - Other virtualization platforms, such as Proxmox or VMware. - SAN and NAS storage, and multipathing. - Monitoring and host intrusion detection, such as Prometheus, Grafana, netdata or Wazuh. - Jenkins or other build farms, and caching mirrors or proxies for apt, PyPI, npm or Maven. - Backup tools such as restic, borg or ZFS replication. - Infrastructure that supports SOC 2 or ISO 27001 controls. - Debian and its derivatives. - Other cloud providers, such as Linode. ## About RapidFort, Inc. ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: RapidFort provides a software supply chain security platform that automatically hardens container images, eliminates up to 99.9% of CVEs, and provides continuous compliance validation. - **Entity Type**: Private – Series A (Total raised: $50.5M; last round: $42M, ~5 months ago) - **Headquarters**: Sunnyvale, California, USA (440 North Wolfe Road) - **Founded**: 2020 - **Founders**: Not publicly available (CEO & Founder and CTO & Founder are listed but names not disclosed in available sources) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Cybersecurity – Software Supply Chain Security & Container Security - **Target customers**: B2B – Enterprise and Federal organizations (regulated environments like FedRAMP, CMMC, SOC 2, NIS2, CRA) - **Mission statement**: “Eliminate vulnerabilities continuously – without code changes, OS changes or pipeline modifications.” ## Products & Services - **RapidFort Container Security Platform**: A SaaS platform that analyzes container runtime behavior to identify unused components, automatically removes them, and rebuilds hardened container images every 24 hours. Reduces attack surface by 60–90% and eliminates up to 99.9% of CVEs without altering application code. - **Curated Near-Zero CVE Images**: A library of 35,000+ production-ready container images built on trusted LTS distributions (Ubuntu, RHEL, Debian, Alpine) with minimal CVE count, continuously patched and hardened. - **Runtime Bill of Materials (RBOM)**: A tool that provides visibility into which software components are actually executed inside containers, enabling teams to prioritize real vulnerabilities over theoretical risks. - **Continuous Compliance Validation**: Automated evaluation of container images against STIG, CIS, FedRAMP, CMMC, and other security benchmarks, generating audit-ready reports across CI/CD, registries, and Kubernetes environments. ## Market Standing - **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed - **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – $50.5M (Series A of $42M closed ~5 months prior to this profile) - **Notable Investors / Partners**: Not publicly listed in available sources; 35,000+ curated images built on Ubuntu, RHEL, Debian, Alpine - **Growth Signals**: Active hiring across multiple remote roles (Engineering, Sales, Customer Support); claims 82 million vulnerabilities removed on platform; 5 patents filed; used in federal and regulated environments. ## Competitive Advantages - **Runtime‑aware reduction**: Instead of traditional static scanning, uses real production behavior to identify and remove unused software, shrinking attack surface up to 90% while preserving functionality. - **No code changes required**: CVE remediation happens automatically without altering application code, OS, or pipeline – a key differentiator for security teams. - **Near‑zero CVE base images**: A curated library of 35,000+ images reduces inherited vulnerabilities before deployment. - **Enterprise & Federal readiness**: Supports STIG, FIPS, FedRAMP, CMMC, SOC 2, CRA – meeting strict compliance requirements that many competitors cannot. - **Vendor lock‑in avoidance**: Built on true open source distributions (Ubuntu, RHEL, Debian, Alpine) – no proprietary OS lock-in. ## Strategic Focus - Expanding reach into regulated industries (federal, defense, finance) by continuously hardening images and certificates. - Automating compliance evidence generation to accelerate certifications (FedRAMP, CMMC). - Scaling the curated‑image library and RBOM capabilities to reduce vulnerability noise by 25% for enterprise customers. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & Impact**: Directly addressing one of the most pressing cybersecurity challenges – container and software supply chain security – with a platform that eliminates up to 99.9% of CVEs automatically. - **Work model**: Remote‑first (all open positions explicitly listed as remote). - **Engineering focus**: Strong emphasis on security, distributed systems, and build engineering – roles include Senior Software Engineer (Security & Distributed Systems), Staff Engineer (Team Lead), Linux Distribution Engineer, and SDET/QA Automation. - **Growth stage**: Series A with strong funding and active hiring across multiple functions; opportunity to shape products in a fast‑growing cybersecurity startup. ## Sources 1. [rapidfort.com](https://www.rapidfort.com/) 2. [rapidfort.com/about](https://www.rapidfort.com/company/about-us) 3. [rapidfort.com/careers](https://www.rapidfort.com/company/careers) 4. [job-boards.greenhouse.io](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/rapidfortinc) 5. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/rapidfort) ## Other roles at RapidFort, Inc. - [Senior Software Engineer — Container Images & Security](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-container-images-security-rapidfort-inc-united-states-w4xsf48a3azj) — United States - [Cloud Operations Engineer — Linux & Kubernetes](https://feeny.ai/job/cloud-operations-engineer-linux-kubernetes-rapidfort-inc-united-kingdom-j4day1wm9res) — United Kingdom - [Procurement & Vendor Management Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/procurement-vendor-management-manager-rapidfort-inc-remote-nynyye8mmsj4) - [Enterprise Account Executive — New Logo](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-new-logo-rapidfort-inc-united-kingdom-9pexnsc2m6ew) — United Kingdom - [Senior Accounting Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-accounting-manager-rapidfort-inc-san-francisco-5j4mawy411j8) — San Francisco, CA - [Director of Cyber Security](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-cyber-security-rapidfort-inc-remote-6m9d1amyfmj3) - [Channel & Partner Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/channel-partner-marketing-manager-rapidfort-inc-remote-d554fgjjkgv2) - [Senior Software Engineer – Security & Distributed Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-security-distributed-systems-rapidfort-inc-remote-7ts567z8t7as) - [Public Sector Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/public-sector-marketing-manager-rapidfort-inc-remote-bxdpaqqbcsha) - [Digital Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/digital-marketing-manager-rapidfort-inc-remote-1zhp8s6f7azv)