Lead Linux System Administrator - Nekki - game developer and publisher

Jobs requirements

Nekki is a game development studio, the creator of Shadow Fight Arena, Shadow Fight 3, Shadow Fight 2, 11×11, and Vector. The total number of registered users for our games exceeds 1 billion worldwide. We develop and release games for PC, consoles, and mobile platforms.

We are looking for a Lead Linux System Administrator to lead a distributed team of 3–4 system administrators and one L1 support engineer. This is a hands-on role combining people management, technical leadership, and direct involvement in complex infrastructure work.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and develop the team: set priorities, plan work, mentor team members, conduct one-to-one meetings and performance reviews, and participate in hiring and onboarding.
• Ensure that the team maintains reliable production and internal infrastructure, including monitoring, logging, backups, and disaster recovery.
• Define and maintain infrastructure security practices, including access management, system hardening, and patching.
• Oversee the timely handling of infrastructure incidents, escalations, and internal support requests.
• Plan and deliver infrastructure improvements, migrations, and capacity expansion.
• Operate and improve internal engineering services, and automate routine operations using Bash and Ansible.
• Coordinate infrastructure work with project teams and the DevOps team.

What we are looking for:

• Experience managing a system administration or infrastructure team, including performance management and work prioritization.
• Strong technical leadership and senior-level hands-on Linux administration skills, preferably with RHEL, CentOS, or AlmaLinux.
• Strong knowledge of networking and production troubleshooting.
• Strong Bash and Ansible skills.
• Experience administering PostgreSQL in production.
• Experience operating and securing production infrastructure, including monitoring, backups, access management, patching, and incident response.
• Ability to take ownership, make technical decisions, and communicate clearly within a distributed team.
• Fluent communication in Russian is required

Our technology landscape. We do not expect candidates to have experience with every technology listed below. Experience with several of these areas will be an advantage.

• Cloud and hosting: AWS, Tencent Cloud, and dedicated servers hosted at OVH and Hetzner.
• Virtualization, containers, and storage: Proxmox VE, Proxmox Backup Server, Docker, and ZFS.
• Databases: PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, and a small number of MySQL services.
• Monitoring and logging: Zabbix, Grafana, Percona Monitoring and Management, Graylog, and Elasticsearch.
• Identity and access: Keycloak, OpenZiti, and Google Workspace.
• Content delivery: Akamai and other CDN providers.
• Engineering services: TeamCity, GitLab, Perforce, Jira, and Confluence.
• Application environments: primarily Java-based game backends, plus some Python and PHP services.

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If you have not received a response within 7-10 days, your application has not been selected for further consideration. Our team would like to thank you for your time. By submitting a response to our vacancy, you agree that your personal data collected during interviews at Nekki will be processed by the company.