Senior Linux Platform Engineer - RHEL Expert - Freelance

Context

A leading global industrial group’s CTO Federated IT Services (FITS) team is seeking a highly skilled and motivated Senior Linux Platform Engineer to lead Linux platform expertise and standards within its federated infrastructure model. This key role involves defining, standardizing, and securing Linux-based infrastructure services across the company’s global IT landscape, with a strong focus on Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystems and automation.

The engineer will be responsible for defining, maintaining, and evolving Linux platform standards, ensuring security compliance, automation at scale, and providing expert-level support during major incidents and vulnerabilities. Acting as a technical authority for Linux technologies across global ITS teams, the engineer will contribute to building robust, automated, and secure infrastructure services and drive the strategic development and usage of the Linux ecosystem.

This role collaborates closely with the India IT team on a daily basis and is strategically positioned in France (Tour location) to ensure strong alignment with Group CTO governance and other global infrastructure teams, supporting the transformation toward a Federated Target Operating Model (FTOM).

Missions

• Act as the subject matter expert for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and associated ecosystem.
• Define, document, and enforce standards, hardening guidelines, and installation baselines for Linux systems.
• Maintain platform consistency and compliance across global environments.
• Provide guidance to regional teams on best practices and architecture decisions.
• Design, operate, and enhance Red Hat Satellite platform and associated components: katello, foreman, subscription-manager, hammer-cli, pulp.
• Ensure efficient lifecycle management: patching, provisioning, compliance, content management.
• Design and maintain RPM packaging processes: build, versioning, signing (GPG), distribution.
• Define and manage enterprise repositories strategy: mirroring, lifecycle environments, content views.
• Ensure secure and traceable software delivery pipelines.
• Lead the adoption and implementation of Ansible and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP).
• Develop and maintain playbooks, roles, collections, automation workflows.
• Promote Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles across ITS teams.
• Contribute to automation of system configuration, patching, provisioning, application deployment and configuration, remediation, and compliance.
• Provide scripting expertise related to host management: shell scripting, cron jobs, logrotate, etc.
• Provide deep expertise on key Linux components including:
  • Databases: MariaDB, PostgreSQL
  • Middleware and runtimes: Python, Ruby, Node.js, Perl
  • Application services: Apache (httpd), Nginx
• Provide cross-platform and virtualization knowledge.
• Containerization expertise on K3S, kubvirt, podman with CI/CD tool chain knowledge.
• Support and advise on other Linux ecosystems such as Debian/Ubuntu distributions and their management tooling.
• Work with virtualization platforms: VMware (primary), Proxmox and derivatives (Red Hat Edge Device and Openshift Virt).
• Contribute to design and integration of authentication and identity mechanisms: SSSD, Red Hat IDM, Active Directory, PAM, OAuth, SAML, etc.
• Manage certificates including ACME-based certificate automation.
• Define and enforce security hardening policies.
• Support compliance requirements and audits.
• Act as technical escalation point for critical incidents and major vulnerabilities.
• Analyze issues and define remediation procedures and mitigation strategies.
• Validate applicability and scalability of fixes across environments.
• Collaborate closely with FITS teams, other global infrastructure teams, regional ITS teams, and security teams.
• Provide technical documentation, training, and knowledge sharing.
• Interact with vendors and purchasing teams.
• Support global standard adoption.
• Contribute to platform strategy evolution (cloud, hybrid, automation-first approach).
• Participate in tool standardization initiatives across infrastructure domains.
• Support integration with monitoring, backup, and orchestration platforms.

Deliverables

Architecture & Standards

• Linux platform standards and hardening guidelines.
• Kickstarts, cloud-init, and associated system image definitions.
• RHEL ecosystem architecture documentation (Satellite, repositories, automation).
• Security and compliance baseline definitions.

Automation & Tooling

• Ansible playbooks, roles, and collections.
• Automation frameworks for provisioning, patching, remediation.

Operations

• Standard operating procedures (SOPs) for Linux platform management.
• Incident resolution and vulnerability remediation procedures.
• Validation frameworks for patches and fixes deployment.

Knowledge & Enablement

• Documentation and knowledge base.
• Training materials for ITS teams.
• Technical guidelines and best practices.