Drupal Middleware Administrator Senior

Inetum is a European leader in digital services. Inetum’s team of 27,000 consultants and specialists strive every day to make a digital impact for businesses, public sector entities and society. Inetum’s solutions aim at contributing to its clients’ performance and innovation as well as the common good. Present in 19 countries with a dense network of sites, Inetum partners with major software publishers to meet the challenges of digital transformation with proximity and flexibility. Driven by its ambition for growth and scale, Inetum generated sales of 2.4 billion euros in 2024.  

• We are seeking an experienced Drupal Platform Infrastructure Engineer to manage, secure, automate, and optimize a business-critical Drupal platform running on Ubuntu Linux.

  This role is focused on platform engineering, operational excellence, automation, observability, security, vulnerability management, and controlled software delivery rather than Drupal application development.

  The successful candidate will serve as the technical bridge between Drupal development teams and infrastructure teams (Linux, Database, Network, Security, and Observability). Developers do not have direct access to production servers and must use approved CI/CD pipelines and operational automation provided by the Drupal Platform Infrastructure Engineer.

  The ideal candidate combines strong Linux infrastructure expertise with practical Drupal platform knowledge and is capable of assessing the operational, performance, security, and stability impact of Drupal modules, platform changes, and deployment processes.

Qualifications

• Key Responsibilities

  Drupal Platform Ownership

• Own the operational health, security, stability, performance, and lifecycle management of Drupal platforms running on Ubuntu Linux.
• Maintain a complete inventory of installed Drupal core versions, contributed modules, themes, and platform components.
• Review, assess, and approve new Drupal modules from an infrastructure, operational, performance, and security perspective.
• Evaluate the impact of new modules on:
  • Platform stability
  • Security posture
  • Application performance
  • Operational complexity
  • Upgrade and maintenance requirements
  • Compatibility with platform standards and architecture
• Provide recommendations to development teams regarding module selection, lifecycle management, and platform governance.
• Support Drupal core and module upgrades while minimizing operational risk.
• Ensure Drupal environments comply with established operational and security standards.

• Secure Platform Operations & Vulnerability Management

• Implement and maintain secure operational procedures for Drupal environments.
• Ensure all platform changes are performed through approved, auditable, and controlled processes.
• Enforce least-privilege access principles and segregation of duties.
• Support platform hardening activities across Linux, web servers, middleware, and Drupal components.
• Monitor security advisories related to:
  • Drupal Core
  • Drupal contributed modules
  • Ubuntu Linux
  • Apache/NGINX
  • Varnish
  • HAProxy
  • Solr
  • Supporting platform components
• Assess and prioritize vulnerabilities based on business impact, exploitability, and platform exposure.
• Review CVEs and security bulletins and determine remediation requirements.
• Coordinate remediation activities with development, Linux, database, network, and security teams.
• Ensure timely deployment of security patches while maintaining platform stability.
• Perform impact assessments before applying security updates.
• Support compliance, audit, and security review activities.

• CI/CD, Automation & Controlled Deployments

• Manage and support GitLab-based source control and release management processes.
• Ensure deployments are:
  • Secure
  • Automated
  • Repeatable
  • Auditable
  • Consistent across environments
• Develop and maintain automation for:
  • Drupal deployments
  • Configuration management
  • Cache management
  • Platform validation
  • Health checks
  • Operational maintenance activities
  • Rollback procedures
• Collaborate with developers to define approved Drupal operational commands and parameters exposed through automation.
• Continuously improve deployment reliability and release processes.

• Linux Infrastructure Engineering

• Administer Ubuntu Linux servers hosting Drupal workloads.
• Manage operating system lifecycle activities including patching, upgrades, security hardening, and capacity planning.
• Maintain platform reliability, availability, and operational readiness.
• Troubleshoot issues affecting application and infrastructure services.
• Support disaster recovery and business continuity requirements where applicable.

• Performance Engineering & Bottleneck Analysis

• Monitor and analyze performance across all platform layers:
  • Drupal application layer
  • Web server layer
  • Varnish caching layer
  • HAProxy load balancing layer
  • Solr search infrastructure
  • Linux operating system
  • Database interactions
  • Storage infrastructure
  • Network infrastructure
• Identify performance bottlenecks and proactively communicate findings and recommendations to:
  • Drupal development teams
  • Linux engineering teams
  • Database administrators
  • Network engineering teams
  • Security teams
• Participate in root cause analysis and problem management activities.
• Support capacity planning and performance optimization initiatives.
• Analyze trends and proactively identify risks before service degradation occurs.

• Web Platform Components

• Manage and support critical platform services including:
  • Apache HTTP Server and/or NGINX
  • Varnish Cache
  • HAProxy
  • Apache Solr
• Optimize caching strategies and content delivery performance.
• Support load balancing and traffic management configurations.
• Collaborate with developers to improve search platform performance and indexing reliability.
• Monitor service health and operational effectiveness of all middleware components.

• Observability & Monitoring

• Work closely with observability engineers to improve platform visibility and operational insight.
• Assist in the design, implementation, and maintenance of Grafana dashboards.
• Contribute to the collection and interpretation of metrics from:
  • Prometheus
  • Loki
  • Linux systems
  • Drupal applications
  • Web servers
  • Varnish
  • HAProxy
  • Solr
  • Database services
• Define operational KPIs, service health indicators, SLOs, and alerting requirements.
• Support proactive monitoring and capacity management practices.
• Contribute to operational reporting and service improvement initiatives.

• Cross-Team Collaboration

• Act as a technical liaison between development teams and infrastructure teams.
• Coordinate activities with Linux, database, network, security, and observability engineers.
• Translate operational requirements into automated and supportable platform solutions.
• Support change management, incident management, and problem management processes.
• Participate in architecture and platform review discussions.

• Platform Governance & Documentation

• Define and maintain platform standards and operational procedures.
• Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, deployment guides, operational playbooks, and support procedures.
• Support compliance, audit, and governance requirements.
• Ensure platform consistency across development, test, staging, and production environments.
• Promote operational best practices and continuous improvement.

• Required (Must-Have) Skills

  Linux & Infrastructure

• Strong experience administering Ubuntu/Linux systems in enterprise production environments.
• Advanced troubleshooting and performance analysis skills.
• Experience with Linux security hardening, patch management, and system administration.
• Strong understanding of enterprise web application hosting platforms.

• Drupal Platform Expertise

• Strong operational knowledge of Drupal architecture and platform management.
• Experience supporting Drupal environments in production.
• Good understanding of Drupal core, modules, themes, configuration management, and operational tooling.
• Experience evaluating Drupal modules from a security, performance, operational, and maintainability perspective.
• Familiarity with Drush and Drupal administrative operations.

• CI/CD, Automation & Source Control

• Experience with GitLab repositories, branching strategies, merge requests, and release management workflows.
• Strong scripting skills using Bash, Shell scripting, Python, or similar languages.
• Experience implementing controlled and auditable deployment processes.

• Security & Vulnerability Management

• Experience managing vulnerabilities in enterprise Linux and web application platforms.
• Ability to assess CVEs, security advisories, and vendor security bulletins and determine their impact.
• Experience coordinating vulnerability remediation across multiple technical teams.
• Knowledge of Drupal security advisories and module lifecycle management.
• Understanding of security hardening principles for Linux-based web application platforms.
• Experience supporting security audits, compliance activities, and risk assessments.

• Performance & Troubleshooting

• Experience identifying bottlenecks across application, middleware, operating system, database, and network layers.
• Strong analytical and diagnostic capabilities.
• Ability to coordinate troubleshooting activities across multiple technical teams.

• Collaboration & Communication

• Experience working with developers, Linux engineers, database administrators, network engineers, security teams, and observability specialists.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to translate technical findings into actionable recommendations.

• Preferred (Nice-to-Have) Skills

  Observability

• Experience with Grafana dashboard creation and maintenance.
• Experience with Prometheus metrics collection and alerting.
• Experience with Loki log aggregation and analysis.
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and modern observability practices.

• Web & Middleware Technologies

• Advanced experience with Varnish Cache administration and tuning.
• Experience configuring and managing HAProxy load balancing environments.
• Experience administering and tuning Apache Solr search platforms.
• Experience with Apache HTTP Server and/or NGINX.
• Knowledge of CDN integration and content delivery optimization.

• Infrastructure Automation

• Experience with Ansible, Terraform, or Infrastructure as Code solutions.
• Experience automating infrastructure provisioning and configuration management.

• Database Awareness

• Understanding of MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or equivalent database technologies.
• Ability to identify database-related performance bottlenecks and collaborate effectively with database administrators.

• Container & Cloud Technologies

• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes.
• Experience operating workloads in Azure Cloud environments.

• Security Tooling

• Experience with vulnerability management and security scanning platforms such as Nessus, trivvy, or equivalent tools.
• Experience integrating security scanning into GitLab and Jenkins CI/CD pipelines.

• Candidate Profile

  The ideal candidate is a platform-oriented infrastructure engineer who combines strong Linux administration, automation, security, and operational governance skills with practical Drupal platform expertise. They understand how Drupal behaves in production environments, can evaluate the impact of Drupal modules and platform changes, enforce secure and controlled deployment practices, proactively manage vulnerabilities, and collaborate effectively across development, infrastructure, database, network, security, and observability teams.

  The successful candidate takes ownership of platform reliability, performance, security, and operational excellence while ensuring that all deployments and platform changes follow secure, automated, controlled, and auditable processes.