Server Engineer Lead

About the role

The Server Engineer - Lead is a senior technical contributor responsible for architecting, operating, and optimizing the organization's enterprise compute and virtualization ecosystem. This role ensures the security, stability, scalability, and lifecycle management of a large fleet of Intel-based server hardware and virtual infrastructure built on VMware and other hypervisors that support critical manufacturing, ERP, engineering, and enterprise business applications across data center and hybrid cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, implementation, lifecycle management, and operational support of the enterprise compute environment, including Intel-based server platforms and virtualization platforms based on VMware and other hypervisors.
• Manage server hardware standards, platform design, firmware strategy, host lifecycle management, and infrastructure refresh planning across the enterprise.
• Oversee the health, performance, availability, and capacity of virtualization environments, including hypervisor hosts, management platforms, clusters, distributed resource scheduling, and high availability configurations.
• Design and maintain resilient compute and virtualization solutions that support mission-critical enterprise workloads with strong emphasis on uptime, recoverability, and operational consistency.
• Partner with storage, networking, backup, security, and application teams to ensure end-to-end performance and reliability of hosted workloads.
• Establish and maintain operational standards for provisioning, patching, upgrades, host remediation, and configuration consistency across the compute estate.
• Serve as a senior escalation point for complex server hardware and virtualization incidents, leading root-cause analysis and restoration efforts for critical platform issues.
• Drive proactive management of system health, resource utilization, hardware events, performance bottlenecks, and operational risks across the compute environment.
• Lead capacity planning and performance optimization efforts for compute, memory, clustering, and virtualization resources to support current and future business demand.
• Oversee platform resilience through design and support of high-availability, fault-tolerant, and disaster recovery aligned infrastructure services.
• Ensure enterprise operational readiness for maintenance events, lifecycle transitions, incident response, and business continuity requirements.
• Architect and maintain automated workflows using tools such as Ansible, Terraform, PowerCLI, and scripting languages such as PowerShell or Python for provisioning, configuration management, patching, and compliance activities.
• Build and enhance automation for hypervisor host deployment, cluster configuration, lifecycle management, and policy enforcement.
• Codify operational procedures and infrastructure standards into repeatable, auditable automation workflows to reduce manual effort and improve consistency.
• Support infrastructure change through automated validation, testing, and deployment processes that improve quality and reduce risk.
• Lead engineering and administration of virtualization platforms, including core hypervisor services, cluster design, host profiles, virtual networking coordination, and integration with enterprise storage and backup platforms.
• Maintain deep expertise in Vmware, as well as other hypervisors and technologies that make up the enterprise compute portfolio.
• Maintain familiarity with adjacent technologies supporting the virtual infrastructure ecosystem, including hyperconverged platforms, disaster recovery tooling, monitoring systems, VMware Aria Operations, container platforms, and hybrid cloud extensions where applicable.
• Maintain familiarity with public cloud compute services and how enterprise workloads, recovery strategies, and management practices may extend into Azure, AWS, or similar environments as part of a broader infrastructure portfolio.
• Collaborate with platform, cloud, and application teams to support evolving infrastructure patterns, including integration with private cloud and container-hosting platforms where virtual infrastructure is foundational.
• Provide technical leadership on modernization opportunities that improve efficiency, scalability, recoverability, and operational simplicity across the enterprise compute platform.
• Maintain and enhance platform visibility through enterprise monitoring, alerting, and performance analytics tools, including VMware Aria Operations, Grafana, and related ecosystem tooling, to support rapid issue detection and response.
• Establish dashboards, alert thresholds, and operational reporting for server hardware health, virtualization performance, resource consumption, capacity trends, and availability.
• Use telemetry, trend analysis, and platform insights to inform capacity decisions, lifecycle planning, and service improvement initiatives.
• Partner with enterprise monitoring and operations teams to improve actionable insight across the compute and virtualization landscape.
• Serve as a subject matter expert and technical leader for enterprise server hardware and virtualization technologies.
• Mentor junior engineers and help establish best practices for compute operations, virtualization engineering, automation, lifecycle management, and operational monitoring.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with infrastructure, security, architecture, and application stakeholders to align platform capabilities with business priorities.
• Contribute to strategic planning, roadmaps, standards development, and investment recommendations for enterprise compute and virtualization services.

Requirements

• Five (5) or more years of experience in the field or in a related area.
• Monitoring, troubleshooting, customer service, problem solving, cross team collaboration, risk analysis, analytical, operating systems, hardware, infrastructure design, scripting.
• Strong communication, time management, problem solving, teamwork, leadership, mentoring, project management, business acumen, requirements gathering, planning.

Qualifications

• Experience: 7+ years administering and architecting enterprise server infrastructure and virtualization environments at scale.
• Technical Expertise: Deep understanding of Intel-based enterprise server hardware, VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, VMware Aria Operations, and comparable virtualization platforms, including clustering, virtualization performance tuning, and infrastructure lifecycle management.
• Platform Operations: Strong experience managing large virtualized environments supporting mission-critical enterprise applications in a highly available and regulated setting.
• Automation: Proficiency with Ansible, Terraform, PowerCLI, and scripting languages such as PowerShell or Python for infrastructure automation and operational efficiency.
• Hardware Lifecycle Management: Experience with firmware baselines, hardware compatibility, server provisioning, vendor interoperability, and compute platform refresh strategy.
• Ecosystem Knowledge: Strong understanding of integration points across compute, storage, networking, backup, disaster recovery, identity, monitoring, and container platforms.
• Container Familiarity: Familiarity with container management platforms and how virtual infrastructure supports solutions such as OpenShift, Kubernetes, or similar enterprise container ecosystems.
• Public Cloud Familiarity: Working familiarity with public cloud compute services and adjacent infrastructure patterns in Azure, AWS, or similar environments, with understanding of how they complement enterprise data center operations.
• Monitoring and Reliability: Experience with enterprise monitoring, alerting, and operational visibility platforms used to manage compute and virtualization health and performance, including VMware Aria Operations or similar platforms.
• Leadership: Demonstrated ability to lead complex infrastructure initiatives, mentor technical staff, and drive cross-functional operational improvements.
• Soft Skills: Strong analytical, communication, and problem-solving skills with a focus on platform stability, scalability, and continuous improvement.

Skills

• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience with enterprise server hardware and virtualization technologies.
• Proficiency with automation tools such as Ansible, Terraform, and PowerCLI.
• Experience with monitoring and operational visibility platforms such as VMware Aria Operations.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.

Benefits

The salary range for this position is $110k-$130k depending on experience, with a 7 1/2 annual bonus target based on company performance.

Pay

The salary range for this position is $110k-$130k depending on experience, with a 7 1/2 annual bonus target based on company performance.

Schedule

Hours: Monday-Friday 8AM-4PM with on call. Must be able to work at the office 3 days a week and travel 10-15% of the time to local data centers.