Lead Systems Engineer

Job Details

We're hiring a Lead DevOps Engineer to raise the standard of how we build, test, deploy, and operate software. This is a hands-on role with strong technical ownership and a developer enablement mindset: you'll reduce deployment friction, improve environment reliability and quality, strengthen observability, and lead incident resolution through to completion.

• Lead automation initiatives that eliminate repetitive tasks and reduce operational toil.
• Build and maintain Ansible automation to provision new environments and keep existing environments up to date.
• Propose and lead platform improvement projects using tools such as Ansible, Rundeck, and CI/CD systems.
• Design and improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation with safe rollout/rollback strategies and clear environment promotion.
• Enable developers through reusable “paved road” tooling: templates, golden pipelines, self-service workflows, and guardrails that reduce manual work and tribal knowledge.
• Partner with engineering teams to improve delivery quality through:
  • Automated integration and regression testing,
  • Deployment validation and smoke testing,
  • Reliable and repeatable test/pre-production environments,
  • Quality gates that catch issues earlier.
• Improve observability across services and infrastructure (monitoring, logging, alerting, tracing), including visibility into deployment outcomes and failures.
• Lead analysis and resolution of production incidents across infrastructure, application, database, and network layers; drive RCAs and prevention work.
• Oversee platform patching and upgrades; plan, schedule, and monitor maintenance tasks.
• Cook up and implement server/platform changes required by customers and internal teams.
• Document systems and processes, transfer knowledge, and mentor engineers to raise technical standards across the organization.
• Communicate proactively with stakeholders, manage multiple requests, and prioritize work effectively.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (or equivalent) or equivalent professional experience.
• 6+ years of RedHat Linux server administration experience, including production troubleshooting and log triage.
• 6+ years of extensive Ansible scripting and automation experience (or equivalent configuration management).
• 6+ years of scripting experience in Bash and Python.
• Experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across distributed systems (infrastructure, application, database, and network layers).
• Strong working knowledge of MySQL (query language required); Postgres experience is a plus.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to lead through planning, prioritization, and influence.
• Proven ability to context switch, manage multiple stakeholder requests, and deliver reliably under deadlines.

Preferred Qualifications

• Container infrastructure design and implementation; experience with Docker; Kubernetes/Helm a plus.
• Experience with Rundeck, Jenkins, SOLR, and/or ETCD.
• Experience with monitoring/logging/alerting and modern observability practices (SLOs/SLIs, change correlation, incident reduction).
• Networking fundamentals (DNS, routing, connectivity troubleshooting).
• Familiarity with standard change management practices (e.g., ITIL).
• General programming knowledge/structure; Java familiarity is a plus.
• Experience with progressive delivery (canary/blue-green), feature flags, IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation), and secrets management (Vault or equivalent).
• Interest in extending observability to automated workflows and AI/agent activity (execution tracing, failures, permissions, cost visibility).

Working Style

This role requires strong ownership, organization, attention to detail, proactive stakeholder communication, and a bias toward automation and repeatability. You’ll be expected to take ambiguous, high-impact problems through to resolution and leave the platform better than you found it.

Company Information

OCLC practices a hybrid work location model allowing at least 3 days a week in the office and 2 days remote.