Job Description
This position combines deep Linux/Unix domain expertise, strong infrastructure engineering discipline, and a modern operational mindset. It drives continuous improvement across infrastructure services, ensuring evolution toward automation‑first execution, actionable observability, and sustainable production operations.
The position functions as a technical and operational leadership role, setting direction and enabling execution through teams, platforms, and automation, while remaining sufficiently hands‑on to design, validate, and contribute to complex automation and operational solutions. It is critical to ensuring that Linux and Unix infrastructure scales through engineering excellence rather than operational overhead, converting operational knowledge into durable, automated capabilities that benefit the entire organization
Key Responsibilities
Scaled Operations & Engineering First
- Design operational practices to scale through standardization, automation, and self‑service, rather than linear increases in effort.
- Define, drive, and govern implementation of automation, tooling, and monitoring to operate infrastructure efficiently and at scale.
- Ensure infrastructure services are engineered using infrastructure‑as‑code and configuration‑as‑code principles.
- Drive automation of provisioning, configuration, validation, and operational workflows to reduce manual intervention and recurring effort.
- Eliminate recurring manual operational tasks by converting them into automated or self‑service capabilities.
- Ensure infrastructure changes follow controlled lifecycle practices aligned with software development and configuration management disciplines.
- Ensure infrastructure services are engineered with security controls embedded by design, leveraging standardization, automation, and configuration management.
Observability & AI‑Assisted Operations
- Ensure infrastructure observability provides actionable insight across infrastructure and application layers.
- Enable effective correlation between infrastructure behavior and service performance.
- Drive adoption of AI‑assisted operational practices, including event correlation, noise reduction, and faster incident triage.
- Use telemetry and operational signals to proactively improve reliability and prevent recurring issues.
Infrastructure Ownership & Operational Integrity
- Provide technical and operational leadership across Linux/Unix operations teams, setting standards, priorities, and execution patterns.
- Plan, design, oversee the build and ongoing integrity of Linux and Unix infrastructure services supporting enterprise business systems across all environments.
- Own the end‑to‑end integrity of infrastructure environments, ensuring availability, performance, reliability, and operational readiness.
- Provide senior technical leadership for incident investigation, problem resolution, and preventive operational improvement.
- Drive preventive maintenance, diagnostics, health checks, and remediation through automated, standards‑based approaches.
- Use operational data and service metrics to identify risks, bottlenecks, and improvement opportunities.
- Provide senior technical leadership during high‑severity incidents, ensuring effective resolution and contributing to incident response when escalation and expertise are required.
Education level:
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience/Technical Skills:
- 7+ years of progressive experience in Linux and Unix infrastructure engineering and operations within large‑scale enterprise environments.
- Demonstrated experience designing and operating infrastructure using automation‑first principles, including infrastructure‑as‑code and configuration‑as‑code.
- Proven ability to reduce operational toil by automating recurring activities and introducing standardized, self‑service operational practices, including execution workflows where appropriate.
- Experience designing or operating observable infrastructure, with the ability to interpret telemetry, metrics, and signals across infrastructure and application layers to enable proactive operations.
- Exposure to or hands‑on experience with AI‑assisted operational practices, including event correlation, noise reduction, accelerated incident triage, and selected self‑healing scenarios.
- Strong understanding of incident, problem, and change management, applied pragmatically to support scalable, automated, and reliable operations.
- Experience operating infrastructure in hybrid environments, including public cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Azure) and on‑premise systems and related HW.
- Solid grounding in infrastructure security fundamentals, with experience embedding security controls through standardization, automation, and configuration management.
- Experience providing technical oversight of managed service providers and working effectively across internal teams and external partners.
- Demonstrated ability to operate at both engineering depth and system level, balancing hands‑on problem solving with long‑term operational and platform improvement.
- Proven leadership experience in guiding engineers or operations teams toward modern, engineering‑led and automation‑centric ways of working.
- Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills, with the ability to translate operational data into actionable improvements, automation opportunities, and preventive controls.
- Excellent communication skills in English, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts to senior and non‑technical stakeholders.
What we offer
- Exciting work in a great team, global projects, international environment
- Opportunity to learn and grow professionally within the company globally
- Hybrid working model, flexible role pattern
- Competitive salary & incentive pay
- Pension and health insurance contributions
- Internal reward system and referral scheme
- 5 weeks annual leave, 5 sick days, 15 days of certified sick leave paid above statutory requirements annually, 40 paid hours annually for volunteering activities, 12 weeks of parental contribution
- Cafeteria for tax free benefits according to your choice (meal vouchers, sport, culture, health, travel, etc.), Multisport Card
- Vodafone, Raiffeisen Bank, Foodora, and discount programmes
- Up-to-date laptop and iPhone
- Parking in the garage, showers, refreshments, massage chairs, library, music corner
Ready to take up the challenge? Apply now!
Know anybody who might be interested? Refer this job!
Required Skills:
Automated Provisioning, Automated Provisioning, Availability Management, Business Systems, Capacity Management, Change Controls, Computer Science, Configuration Management (CM), Design Applications, Enterprise Operations, Event Correlation, Incident Management, Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure, Infrastructure Engineering, Infrastructure Security, IT Infrastructure Management, IT Service Management (ITSM), Managed Services, Operational Design, Preventive Maintenance, Software Configurations, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Solution Architecture, System Administration {+ 1 more}
Preferred Skills:
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Current Contingent Workers apply HERE
Search Firm Representatives Please Read Carefully
Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA, also known as Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, Rahway, NJ, USA, does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of our company. No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place. Where agency agreements are in place, introductions are position specific. Please, no phone calls or emails.
Employee Status:
Regular
Relocation:
No relocation
VISA Sponsorship:
No
Travel Requirements:
10%
Flexible Work Arrangements:
Hybrid
Shift:
1st - Day
Valid Driving License:
No
Hazardous Material(s):
n/a
Job Posting End Date:
05/20/2026
*A job posting is effective until 11:59:59PM on the day BEFORE the listed job posting end date. Please ensure you apply to a job posting no later than the day BEFORE the job posting end date.