Senior Linux System Administrator - 2nd Level Hosting Support/ 2 days ago
Quick Summary
Your Responsibilities
As a key L2 Support Engineer, you will be the technical reference point, handling complex tickets that require advanced problem-solving. This includes multi-layered error patterns, performance issues, and platform-specific challenges. You will also drive team development through technical coaching, standard setting, and reviews, ensuring technical cohesion during critical incidents.
What You'll Do
- Process complex L2 support tickets, performing in-depth error analysis across application, system, and platform levels.
- Manage challenging technical areas such as virtualization, High Availability (HA), storage-related issues, Firewall/VPN, performance/stability problems, and complex migrations.
- Coordinate incident response, prioritizing issues, maintaining oversight, and deriving actionable improvements from disruptions.
- Define and evolve technical standards, including runbooks, escalation rules, minimum ticket data requirements, and support procedures.
- Strengthen the L1/L2 support team through coaching, procedure reviews, and knowledge sharing.
Your Profile
What You Should Bring
- Deep Linux and Service Stack Expertise: Profound understanding of system behavior, load/error patterns, and the side effects of changes.
- Advanced Web/Mail Stack Knowledge: Extensive experience with web servers (e.g., NGINX, Apache), PHP runtimes, databases, caching layers, and reverse proxies (e.g., HAProxy, Traefik), including typical hosting architectures like app/DB separation, replication, and clustering.
- Platform and Virtualization Competence: Proven experience with virtualized environments, HA concepts, and storage solutions (e.g., Proxmox, KVM, Ceph or similar).
- In-depth Error Analysis Skills: Ability to analyze and resolve complex disruptions at application, system, and platform levels, considering dependencies and broader system impacts.
- Technical Leadership and Communication: Capability to mentor colleagues, establish technical standards, and improve workflows. Excellent German and English communication skills for customer interaction, documentation, and vendor communication.
Bonus Skills
- Deep Proxmox/Ceph specialization
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) / Ansible experience
- Firewall/VPN/WAF expertise (e.g., WireGuard, OpenVPN, iptables/nftables)
- Experience with complex migration projects
- In-depth Monitoring/Observability knowledge (e.g., checkmk, Prometheus)
Why Join Us?
What We Offer
- 100% Remote Work: Enjoy full remote flexibility with your choice of hardware. Linux setups are highly encouraged.
- Home office subsidy.
- 30 vacation days.
- Professional Development: Opportunities for growth in system administration, networking, or development, tailored to your career path.
- A close-knit team where individual contributions are recognized.
Application Process
Submit your application by answering a few questions. This is followed by a 30-minute introductory video call, then a 90-minute video interview with work samples, leading to a final decision.
About Us
dataforest has been a leader in the hosting and infrastructure industry since 2009, originally known as PHP-Friends. What began as a side venture for internal customer projects has grown into a company with multiple brands, proprietary platforms, its own network, dedicated hardware across various data centers, and a customer base exceeding 22,000.
Under the dataforest GmbH umbrella, dataforest, PHP-Friends, Avoro, and dataforest cloud operate collaboratively. Our comprehensive technical offerings include web hosting, virtual and dedicated servers, Managed Services, cloud infrastructure, storage, colocation, network services, IP transit, DDoS protection, domain and DNS automation, and bespoke infrastructure projects. We proudly launched our own cloud platform in early 2026.
We operate as a fully remote team, fostering direct communication and a culture where individual responsibility is highly valued. Our work spans a broad spectrum, with close integration across support, development, networking, process management, and commercial functions.
While our team is small, the scope of our projects is significant.