UNIX Solaris Specialist
Overview of Responsibilities
The salary for this role is £57,117 (inclusive of a Specialist Allowance) Onsite working is expected for 3 days each week, however, we actively support requests for flexible working.
This role will be based in Culham, Oxfordshire.
This role requires employees to be eligible for SC Clearance (must have resided in the UK for the last 5 years) including The Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS) checks for criminal convictions and possibly a search of open source data.
The Role
The UNIX Solaris Systems Specialist provides specialist technical direction and assurance for Solaris platforms, ensuring that legacy systems and applications are operated in a secure, stable, and risk-managed manner while supporting UKAEA’s ongoing scientific and operational requirements.
Operating with a high degree of professional autonomy, the role exercises judgement over complex and sometimes ambiguous technical challenges inherent in maintaining and evolving legacy platforms. This includes balancing operational continuity, technical debt, and transition priorities.
The role combines Solaris administration with maintenance and evolution of existing applications. It exists to sustain critical Solaris-based applications and services that underpin scientific workloads and enterprise systems, while enabling controlled migration or retirement strategies. Without this role, UKAEA would face increased operational, security, and continuity risks associated with unsupported or constrained legacy environments.
A defining aspect of the role is hands-on software-level engineering, including the maintenance and evolution of scripts, tooling, and tightly coupled applications required to preserve operability and enable transition.
Key Responsibilities
- Act as a technical subject matter expert for Solaris platforms, providing specialist guidance on lifecycle, performance, resilience and operational integrity.
- Administer, support and troubleshoot Solaris 10 and 11 environments, including Solaris Zones, ZFS, NFS and associated storage technologies.
- Design, develop and maintain system-level tooling and scripts using technologies such as Bash, C, Fortran, AWK, Perl and Python.
- Maintain and adapt in-house and tightly coupled applications within UNIX and Solaris environments.
- Investigate complex incidents across operating system, filesystem and application layers, identifying root causes and implementing long-term corrective actions.
- Identify and manage technical risks associated with legacy infrastructure, unsupported technologies and accumulated technical debt.
- Develop proportionate technical and security controls that balance resilience, operational requirements and platform limitations.
- Contribute to service continuity, recovery and resilience planning for critical systems.
- Provide specialist input into platform migrations, replacements and decommissioning activities, including feasibility assessments, sequencing and transition risk.
- Support data extraction, compatibility solutions and controlled system retirement activities.
- Work closely with application owners, scientists, engineers and other technical stakeholders to maintain business-critical services.
- Translate complex technical issues and risks into clear, actionable information for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Maintain technical documentation and organisational knowledge to support service continuity and reduce reliance on individual expertise.
- Support vulnerability management, audits, assurance activity and risk-based security decision making across supported and unsupported technologies.
Qualifications
Essential Requirements
- A degree in a relevant STEM discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
- Extensive experience administering and supporting Solaris 10 and/or Solaris 11 environments.
- Strong experience with Solaris Zones and system virtualisation.
- Proven experience developing and maintaining legacy code and scripts using technologies such as Bash, C, Fortran, AWK, Perl or Python.
- Experience supporting in-house or tightly coupled applications within UNIX environments.
- Deep technical knowledge of ZFS, NFS and Solaris storage systems.
- Advanced troubleshooting and system-level diagnostic capability.
- Experience contributing to platform migration, modernisation or decommissioning programmes.
- Experience supporting audits, assurance activities and complex risk-based security decisions.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to operate independently within complex or ambiguous technical environments.
- Excellent documentation and stakeholder communication skills.
- Ability to exercise professional judgement where established procedures may not fully apply.
- Eligibility to obtain SC-level national security clearance.
Desirable Experience
- Experience working with Oracle Solaris LDOMs.
- Experience within scientific, research or complex legacy enterprise environments.
- Familiarity with SQL and data systems.
- Knowledge of project and service delivery lifecycles and ITSM controls.
Additional Information
A full list of our benefits can be found here https://careers.ukaea.uk/life-at-ukaea/employee-benefits/
UKAEA’s mission is clean energy for all, and we welcome talented people from all backgrounds to help us achieve this goal. We are committed to equality, diversity, and inclusion and strive to ensure fair representation across our workforce. We particularly encourage applications from groups currently underrepresented in STEM, including women and individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds, while ensuring all appointments are made on merit.
UK Atomic Energy Authority is committed to being accessible. Please email talent@ukaea.uk if you have any questions or require help or adjustments to compete on a fair basis, for example, changes to the way we interview or share information.
Please note that vacancies are generally advertised for 4 weeks but may close earlier if we receive a large number of applications.
