Systems Engineering Manager

Position Summary

Leads a team of systems engineers and systems administrators responsible for the design, deployment, ongoing operation, and delivery of infrastructure and systems projects across Sonic's production environment. This is a hands-on technical leadership role managing a small team of systems engineers and systems administrators. The manager is expected to remain an active technical contributor — participating directly in architecture, tooling, operations, and project execution — on the direction set by the Director of Engineering and Architecture and growing the team's capabilities.

Supervisor Responsibilities

• Manage and mentor a team of systems engineers and systems administrators across a range of disciplines
• Lead hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, and professional development
• Execute goals and priorities as set by the Director, translating direction into team execution
• Plan, prioritize, and drive projects from scoping through delivery, balancing timelines, dependencies, and operational risk
• Collaborate and coordinate with peer engineering managers across Technology (IT, Network Engineering, and Software Engineering) to align on shared infrastructure, cross-functional projects, and organizational priorities
• Foster a culture of operational rigor, documentation, and continuous improvement
• Manage effective on-call rotations and lead incident response
• Functions as a player/coach: maintains active technical contribution alongside management responsibilities, including participation in architecture decisions, tooling development, and operational response

Infrastructure & Operations

• Share responsibility for the reliability, availability, security, and performance of production systems across a large, heterogeneous Linux fleet
• Participate in and help drive fleet lifecycle management including OS upgrades, patching cadence, hardware refresh, and configuration management (Ansible and related tooling)
• Drive capacity planning and resource allocation across bare-metal, Proxmox, and VMware virtualized environments
• Maintain and evolve monitoring, alerting, and log aggregation infrastructure (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Loki/Alloy)

Systems & Services

• Provide technical oversight for critical services including mail infrastructure (SMTP/IMAP, filtering, delivery), DNS (authoritative and recursive), billing and provisioning systems, and internal APIs and tooling
• Ensure systems meet the operational requirements of an ISP serving residential and business subscribers
• Evaluate and guide architectural decisions on service reliability, scalability, and maintainability

Security & Compliance

• Define and enforce standards for access management, change control, secrets management, and system hardening
• Drive continuous improvement of the organization's default security posture and incident response capabilities
• Support audit and compliance requirements relevant to a payment-processing and subscriber-data environment

Tooling & Automation

• Champion automation of operational workflows including provisioning, configuration drift detection, and fleet state management
• Maintain and extend internal tooling written in Perl, shell, and other languages appropriate to the environment
• Evaluate and adopt new tools pragmatically, with preference for solutions that integrate well with existing on-prem infrastructure

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Partner with network engineering, software development, and business stakeholders to align infrastructure with organizational needs
• Manage vendor relationships, hardware procurement, and third-party service integrations
• Communicate system status, incidents, and strategic plans clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences

Qualifications

• 7+ years of hands-on experience in systems engineering, systems administration, or infrastructure engineering roles in a Linux-primary environment
• 2–3 years in a people management or team lead capacity
• Deep familiarity with Linux systems administration at scale — RHEL/CentOS lineage preferred
• Demonstrated experience managing complex, multi-service production environments with real reliability and availability requirements
• Demonstrated experience leading technical projects with cross-functional stakeholders, including planning, prioritization, execution, and delivery
• Hands-on experience with virtualization platforms, specifically Proxmox VE and VMware vSphere, in a production capacity
• Strong scripting ability; comfort reading and writing Perl, Python, or shell in a production context
• Working knowledge of configuration management and fleet automation tools (Ansible or equivalent)
• Solid grounding in networking fundamentals (DNS, SMTP, TCP/IP) relevant to an ISP or network services context
• Experience with monitoring and observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, or similar)
• Ability to evaluate architectural tradeoffs and communicate technical decisions clearly

Compensation

$187,000–$207,000 annually

Benefits & Perks

• Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage
• 401(k) + Profit Sharing
• Paid Time Off
• Education opportunities
• Paid comprehensive training
• Growth opportunities
• Paid pregnancy/bonding leave

Work Environment

The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate.

Physical Demands

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is constantly required to sit; key/type. The employee is occasionally required to stand; walk; use hands to finger, handle, or feel objects, tools or controls; reach with hands and arms; balance; stoop, kneel, crouch or crawl; talk or hear. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 50 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by the job include close vision, distance vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception, and the ability to adjust focus.