Cloud and Automation Engineer

The Opportunity

Mesirow is an independent, employee-owned financial services firm founded in 1937. We are headquartered in Chicago and have offices worldwide. We serve clients through a personalized approach to achieving financial goals and promoting social good. Mesirow has been recognized as one of the Best Places to Work in Chicago and is among Barron’s Top 100 RIA firms.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate infrastructure across Azure and on-premises hyperconverged environments, applying consistent engineering principles regardless of platform.
• Automate provisioning, configuration, and operational tasks using infrastructure-as-code practices, reducing manual and repetitive work across the environment.
• Partner with cross-functional squads to translate business and application requirements into resilient, secure, and maintainable infrastructure designs.
• Contribute to the evolution of our hybrid cloud strategy: helping decide what belongs in the private data center versus Azure, and building the automation that makes those workloads portable and consistently managed.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues that span cloud, virtualization, storage, networking, and identity layers.
• Establish and document standards, patterns, and runbooks that reduce tribal knowledge and make systems easier for the team to support.
• Embed SRE principles and engineering practices into how systems are built and how the team works day to day, favoring measurable reliability, proactive detection, and repeatable process over reactive firefighting.
• Identify opportunities to insource work currently handled by external managed-service partners, and build the automation and monitoring needed to support it internally.
• Contribute to shifting the team's focus away from bespoke, hand-managed infrastructure and toward *aaS models and reusable, codified platforms, freeing capacity to focus on the systems that enable differentiated business capabilities.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and incident response, contributing to root-cause analysis and durable fixes rather than one-off remediation.
• Stay current with evolving cloud, virtualization, and automation practices, and bring new approaches back to the team.

Requirements

• Experience: A solution-oriented systems engineering mindset, paired with continuous improvement and being easy to work with across teams. 5-10 years of demonstrated experience integrating and automating infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code approaches, in a public cloud (Azure preferred) and in a virtualized or hyperconverged on-premises environment. A track record of solving problems that cross multiple layers of the stack, not just working within a single platform or tool. Experience working in cross-functional or squad-based delivery models, partnering with engineers, architects, and business stakeholders outside your immediate team.
• Skills and Approach: Demonstrated experience with Terraform and Ansible, ideally applied in an Azure environment. Strong grounding in core systems and cloud engineering principles: availability, scalability, security, cost, and operability, and the ability to reason about trade-offs between them. A builder's mindset: default to automating and codifying solutions rather than performing repeated manual work. Drive to optimize and re-engineer processes where it makes sense, rather than simply automating what's done today as-is. Comfort operating across a hybrid environment, understanding how workload placement decisions affect cost, performance, resiliency, and support burden. Strong troubleshooting instincts and the ability to work back from symptoms to root cause across interdependent systems. Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to document designs and standards that other engineers can follow. Genuine appetite for learning: comfortable picking up new platforms, tools, and practices as the environment evolves, rather than anchoring to a fixed toolset. Good judgment about when to build, when to buy, and when to simplify rather than automate around unnecessary complexity. Reuse- and security-first mindset, applied in a way that keeps sight of user and developer experience rather than adding friction for its own sake.

Qualifications

N/A

Skills

• Exposure to identity and access management, networking, or telephony systems in addition to core infrastructure.
• Experience contributing to architecture decisions or documentation (e.g., ADRs) rather than only implementing them.
• Familiarity with reducing reliance on outsourced managed services through internal automation and tooling.
• Experience working in a highly regulated financial services environment, including familiarity with the risk, compliance, and change-control expectations common there.

Benefits

N/A

Pay

The anticipated hiring base salary for the role will be between $145,000 and $175,000 per year. However, base pay if hired will be determined on an individualized basis and is only part of the total compensation package, which also provides the opportunity for a bonus and the Mesirow benefit program.

Schedule

This role is on a hybrid schedule, with office presence expected two days per week.

Equal Opportunity Employer

This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights notice from the Department of Labor.