Linux Infrastructure Engineer
US$140,000 – US$180,000 / yr base salary
Posted 2 Sep 2026
Advertised as “Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 6+ yrs
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- Hybrid
| Base salary | US$140,000 – US$180,000 / yr |
|---|---|
| Cash bonus | US$14,000 – US$21,500 |
| Total comp | US$154,000 – US$201,500 |
Company: tastytrade
Role: Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer
Location: Chicago, IL — Hybrid
We are looking for a senior Linux engineer who is equal parts operator and builder. You will own the systems layer of our production environment — from the metal to the configuration management code. This is a hands-on role: you will jump into incidents, tackle challenging engineering problems, design systems that scale, and evaluate new software and architectures.
This is not a role where the abstractions hide the machine. You are expected to be curious about what is underneath and to be the person other engineers come to when a system is behaving in a way nobody can explain.
What You'll Do
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Own Linux performance. Diagnose and tune systems under real production load: CPU scheduling and NUMA placement, memory and page cache behavior, disk and filesystem I/O, and network stack tuning.
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Lead troubleshooting on hard problems. Work incidents methodically — form a hypothesis, find the cheapest test that falsifies it, and narrow the search rather than changing five things at once. Write postmortems, organize follow-up tasks, and future-proof the environment so the same issue does not recur.
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Write and maintain configuration management code. Build infrastructure declaratively with Salt, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet, treating that code with the same standards as application code: reviewed, tested, and version-controlled.
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Run containerized workloads. Build, deploy, and operate services on Kubernetes or Nomad, including scheduling behavior, resource limits, health checking, and the failure modes that only appear under contention.
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Automate in Bash and Python. Replace manual runbooks with tooling and streamline repeatable work.
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Operate core network services. Troubleshoot TCP/IP with confidence and bring solid networking fundamentals. Manage DNS and DHCP as production services — zone management, resolver behavior, TTL strategy, scopes, reservations, and relay configuration.
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Operate the traffic and data tier. Configure and troubleshoot Nginx and HAProxy (routing, TLS termination, health checks, connection handling) and support Redis and RabbitMQ in production.
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Manage virtualization. Provision and maintain guests across VMware, Xen, or KVM, including capacity planning, host maintenance, and live migration.