Senior Systems, Cloud Operations Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of production uptime, infrastructure operations, backups, recovery, and operational reliability for Hirezon's hiring, onboarding, and HR forms platform.

• Monitor and provide alerts on production systems, triage incidents, troubleshoot failures, escalate to hosting providers, and participate in the on-call rotation.

• Manage SQL Server operations, including backups, point-in-time restores, SQL Agent jobs, performance and integrity checks, upgrades, capacity planning, and cluster maintenance.

• Conduct regular restore and disaster-recovery testing, maintain the integrity of offsite and immutable backups, manage backup keys, and meet business recovery objectives.

• Administer Windows Server, Active Directory, service accounts, clustering, storage, compute, and maintain infrastructure lifecycle documentation.

• Contribute to the design and evolution of private-cloud and public-cloud infrastructure, focusing on compute, storage, networking, availability, backup, and security architecture.

• Monitor utilization and growth, forecast infrastructure needs, identify capacity constraints, and suggest infrastructure changes.

• Review hosting and cloud utilization, pinpoint oversized or underutilized resources, evaluate alternatives, and recommend enhancements in performance, resilience, and cost.

• Maintain architecture documentation and assess opportunities for simplification, consolidation, modernization, and migration.

• Oversee Apache, Tomcat, and Java runtime upgrades, manage TLS certificates, DNS, and domains; collaborate with Engineering on SSO, search-service, and application infrastructure upgrades with tested rollbacks.

• Implement precise, tested, and reversible WAF and firewall changes in collaboration with Security; apply server and infrastructure hardening baselines.

• Execute staged patch cycles with validation, maintenance windows, risk prioritization, and rollback plans.

• Manage privileged access, MFA, service accounts, certificates, and API keys, conducting regular access reviews.

• Collect logs, monitor operations, preserve incident and infrastructure evidence for SOC 2 and customer security reviews, and track corrective actions to closure.

• Automate administration, monitoring, validation, backup, and operational tasks using PowerShell and other tools.

• Maintain infrastructure diagrams, lifecycle records, renewal tracking, vendor SLAs, capacity plans, and hosting/cloud cost reviews.

• Collaborate with Engineering on cross-layer incidents, releases, and architecture changes; implement security controls and manage provider escalations.

• Assist other Embrace portfolio companies with infrastructure assessments, CloudOps practices, capacity planning, architecture, reliability, and cost optimization.

• Produce runbooks, operational records, capacity and architecture reviews, improvement plans, and monthly infrastructure health reporting.

• Participate in practical recovery and troubleshooting exercises during hiring.

• Be available for some nights and weekends for scheduled maintenance and urgent incidents.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 7 years of experience administering Windows Server in a production environment for a SaaS, enterprise, or hosted application.

• Proficient in SQL Server operations, including managing backup chains, restores, point-in-time recovery, Agent jobs, index maintenance, upgrades, and clustering; personally restored a production database to a specific point in time.

• Familiarity with Windows failover clustering, Active Directory, Group Policy, and service-account dependencies.

• Strong background in production operations, including monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, change management, and operational recovery.

• Experience managing compute, storage, networking, and capacity in private-cloud, hosted, or virtualized infrastructure environments.

• Knowledge of Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat configuration, including TLS and reverse proxy setups for Java applications.

• Proficient in DNS, CDN/WAF, and certificate management using Cloudflare or similar platforms.

• In-depth understanding of WAF and firewall rules, including rule ordering, exceptions, rate limits, and false positives.

• Familiarity with enterprise vulnerability management and patch-management tools and practices.

• Experience with SIEM, XDR/MDR, and log tooling, including analysis, alert tuning, and monitoring.

• Proficient in PowerShell scripting for administration, automation, and operational checks, including logging and error handling.

• Working knowledge of a public cloud platform such as Azure or AWS, covering storage, backup, compute, networking, identity, and security concepts.

• Understanding of infrastructure capacity planning, right-sizing, performance optimization, and cost optimization.

• Experience evaluating infrastructure architecture and making recommendations regarding scalability, availability, resilience, and lifecycle management.

• Familiarity with immutable or protected backup storage.

• Previous experience with SOC 2, HECVAT, GovRAMP/StateRAMP, or similar audit/compliance work.

• Experience managing hosting, infrastructure, or cloud providers against SLAs.

• Calm under pressure during incident handling and a habit of documenting fixes while converting operational knowledge into runbooks.

• Clear written communication skills for effective handoffs across teams and time zones.

• Availability for night/weekend on-call duties and scheduled maintenance.

• Experience in designing or operating private-cloud, VMware, hosted, or hybrid-cloud infrastructure.

• Azure and/or AWS architecture experience beyond basic administration.

• Knowledge of cloud and infrastructure cost-management, including right-sizing, reserved capacity, storage-tier optimization, and vendor cost analysis.

• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code or configuration-management tools such as Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, Ansible, or similar.

• Experience conducting infrastructure modernization or cloud-readiness assessments.

• Experience migrating workloads between traditional hosting, private cloud, and public cloud environments.

• Knowledge of SAML SSO using Shibboleth or similar platforms, and search platforms like Solr or Elasticsearch.

• Sufficient understanding of Java and SQL to trace application errors into the infrastructure layer and back.

• Experience with automated backup and restore testing.

• Experience building infrastructure dashboards, capacity forecasts, or operational health reports.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary commensurate with experience.

• Opportunities for career advancement and professional development.

• Experience collaborating with a diverse, global team.

• Comprehensive health benefits to support your wellbeing and peace of mind.