Senior Linux Systems Specialist - External Support (Level 3)

Crafty Penguins | Full-time, permanent | Remote within Canada
Compensation: $90,000-$120,000 CAD estimated annualized total, depending on experience, demonstrated capability, and breadth of skills.

Linux is the common denominator, not the boundary of the job

Crafty Penguins is a Linux, Open Source, DevOps, and infrastructure consulting company. We help organizations operate, troubleshoot, secure, improve, and scale the systems their businesses depend on.

Our customers and their environments are extraordinarily diverse. We support SaaS companies, financial institutions, industrial clients, embedded and appliance vendors, internet service providers, and other organizations. Their systems include traditional servers running Nginx and PHP-FPM, cloud and Kubernetes platforms, virtualization and storage, and specialized Linux appliances and embedded devices. Some customers have modern, well-automated infrastructure; others have unusual, older, or heavily customized systems that still need to work reliably.

We’re looking for a senior, client-facing Linux specialist who can navigate that variety. Someone with deep Linux fundamentals, strong networking knowledge, enough software literacy to investigate production applications, and the judgment to solve unfamiliar problems independently.

This isn’t a role limited to following runbooks, patching servers, or escalating every issue that crosses the line between infrastructure and application code.

What Level 3 means here

Our levels describe capability and primary responsibilities, not rigid job boundaries. Everyone pitches in, whether that means routine maintenance or a difficult production incident.





A Level 3 specialist is someone we trust to own and resolve a wide range of complex production problems with minimal supervision. You can enter an unfamiliar customer environment, establish how its components fit together, collect evidence, reason from first principles, and drive an issue to resolution. You recognize when specialized assistance is needed and involve colleagues with a clear account of what you’ve already established.

Our Level 4 specialists are the people other specialists turn to for difficult technical guidance and mentoring. Our Level 5 specialists work at an exceptionally deep level, including designing or building new technologies and approaches. We generally grow Level 4 and Level 5 specialists internally, rather than hiring directly into those levels.

We’re not expecting you to arrive knowing everything. We are expecting the foundation, independence, and curiosity from which that deeper expertise can develop.

Your technical foundation - required

These are baseline competencies, not a list of keywords to put on a resume. We expect you to understand the underlying concepts and apply them in production, even when you need to look up a particular command option or configuration directive.

Linux operating systems

- Robust hands‑on administration and troubleshooting across Debian/Ubuntu and RHEL/Rocky‑style systems.




- Understanding of processes, services, boot, permissions, authentication, filesystems, storage, memory, CPU, and I/O behaviour.
- Ability to use logs, process inspection, system tracing, performance metrics, and other evidence to isolate failures.
- Comfort investigating system behaviour beneath the level of a service restart or a copied troubleshooting procedure.

IP networking and internet protocols

- Solid, immediately accessible knowledge of IP addressing, subnetting, routing, switching fundamentals, DNS, NAT, firewalls, and common transport and application protocols.
- Ability to investigate host and network connectivity with Linux networking tools and packet captures.
- Understanding of how packets travel between applications, hosts, gateways, firewalls, and remote services, including how to locate failures along that path.
- Experience diagnosing network behaviour rather than simply verifying whether a host answers ping.

Web and application infrastructure

- Working knowledge of HTTP/HTTPS, TLS, web servers, reverse proxies, load balancers, and application runtimes.
- Experience across many web stacks, from older application servers and long‑lived PHP, Java, and similar platforms to current reverse proxies, language runtimes, and frameworks. Nginx, Apache, and PHP‑FPM are common examples, not the limit of what you may encounter.
- Understanding of how applications depend on databases, caches, message queues, local storage, external APIs, and network services.
- Ability to investigate configuration limits, timeouts, request handling, application errors, resource exhaustion, and performance problems across the full request path.

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📌 Linux Systems Specialist (Calgary)
🏢 Culture Core Group
📍 Calgary