Skip to content

Linux System Administrator

Bethesda, MDIT SupportOnsite
Summary

Support NCBI's high-traffic biomedical platforms by monitoring, analyzing, and mitigating web abuse, DDoS, and scraping across hybrid cloud and on-prem infrastructure. Requires strong web architecture knowledge and hands-on experience with cloud security controls.

About the role

Duties & Responsibilities

  • Develop and own protection metrics and alerting — build dashboards and alert pipelines that surface anomalies across a range of network and application-layer signals.
  • Perform deep log analysis to identify overuse, scraping, abuse, DDoS, and attack patterns across millions of daily requests.
  • Operate and tune cloud-based edge security controls — configure and update security policies, rate limiting, and adaptive protection rules in response to evolving threats.
  • Enforce traffic controls — apply a range of mitigation strategies to abusive traffic while minimizing impact to legitimate users.
  • Monitor continuously and respond quickly — triage incidents and either resolve them directly or escalate to development or sysadmin teams with clear, actionable information.
  • Support protection across a mixed cloud and on-premises infrastructure.

Requirements

  • Strong understanding of high-volume web service architecture — how traffic flows, where bottlenecks and abuse vectors appear, and how load balancers and edge infrastructure make routing decisions.
  • Hands-on experience with a major cloud provider's security and networking stack.
  • Solid grasp of HTTP/HTTPS protocol internals — headers, TLS behavior, connection patterns, and how these relate to traffic analysis and fingerprinting techniques.
  • Experience analyzing traffic using network and application-layer signals including address-based, organizational, and transport-layer fingerprinting methods.
  • Familiarity with common web server platforms, their log formats, and configuration.
  • Ability to read, write, and tune access control and rate-limiting rules under pressure.
  • Comfort working across hybrid infrastructure environments.

Preferred Skills

  • Experience with advanced abuse mitigation techniques, including traffic redirection and challenge-response mechanisms.
  • Scripting or automation experience (Python, Bash, or similar) for log parsing and rule generation.
  • Prior work protecting high-traffic government or research platforms.
  • Knowledge of bot detection techniques beyond simple blocking — behavioral signals, fingerprinting, headless browser detection, and similar approaches.
  • Familiarity with evolving attacker tradecraft and how modern scrapers and abusers adapt to countermeasures.

Benefits

  • Medical, dental and vision coverage
  • 401k plan with employer contribution
  • Paid holidays and vacation
  • Tuition reimbursement
Skills
PythonBashHTTP/HTTPSTLSCloud securityRate limitingLog analysisTraffic analysisAccess controlBot detection