Principal Systems Engineer

Principal Systems Engineer

The Principal Systems Engineer provides senior technical leadership for the architecture, deployment, and reliable operation of Boingo's global production, staging, QA, beta, and development environments. This role combines hands-on datacenter infrastructure experience with deep private cloud, virtualization, automation, and cloud-native platform expertise.


In this role, you will design, optimize, and support HPE Private Cloud Business Edition (PCBE) environments; manage HPE VME and VMware virtualization platforms; support high-performance HPE compute and storage solutions, including HPE SimpliVity and Nimble architectures; and help build reliable, automated platforms running on Ubuntu and Kubernetes.
Responsibilities

• Architectural Leadership: Define the long-term technical vision and design enterprise-grade, high-availability solutions across all environment tiers. Actively identify single points of failure, technical debt, and cross-domain performance bottlenecks across the HPE PCBE , SimpliVity, and Nimble fabrics.
• End-to-End Infrastructure Lifecycle: Oversee physical layer bare-metal deployments (racking, stacking, cabling) and completely automate the provisioning and post-provisioning lifecycles using cloud-init, HPE iLO/Redfish APIs, and IaC frameworks.
• Private Cloud Engineering at Scale: Build, scale, optimize, and maintain highly resilient Kubernetes, HPE VME , and VMware platforms managed via HPE PCBE to support demanding, high-throughput software products.
• TOIL Elimination: Drive scripting, self-service infrastructure, and test automation to ensure backwards compatibility of features while radically reducing administrative overhead and operational TOIL.
• Governance & Standards: Define, document, and strictly enforce company-wide standards and best practices for systems design, testing, and implementation. Justify and execute improvements using strict change control methodologies.
• Cross-Functional Orchestration: Lead sprint execution within the Atlassian suite ; partner intimately with Network, Development, and QA business units to design creative, proactive solutions to complex operational issues.
• Team Upskilling & Mentorship: Foster a collaborative environment of deep engineering cross-training, upskilling the existing team in Kubernetes, HPE private cloud architectures, and SRE disciplines.
• Mission-Critical Availability: Coordinate on-call escalation procedures and provide high-tier 24x7 support for production outages when emergency remediation is required.

Qualifications

• Experience: 8+ years of progressive experience in systems engineering, DevOps, site reliability engineering, or a related infrastructure engineering role.
• Leadership: Experience leading complex infrastructure initiatives, setting technical direction, and mentoring engineers.
• Operating Systems: Advanced Linux administration experience with Ubuntu and RHEL 7+, including kernel configuration, cgroups, kernel modules, PKI, iptables, and network interfaces.
• Datacenter Infrastructure: Hands-on experience with physical datacenter lifecycle work, including racking, stacking, structured cabling, power and cooling considerations, and bare-metal provisioning.
• HPE & Virtualization Architecture: Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining hyperconverged and storage-centric platforms using HPE Private Cloud Business Edition (PCBE), VMware, and HPE VME environments.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related STEM discipline; or equivalent professional systems engineering experience.

Preferred Technical Expertise & Tooling

• HPE Ecosystem: Strong experience with HPE PCBE, HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged systems, HPE Nimble Storage arrays, HPE GreenLake, HPE OneView, and iLO RESTful APIs.
• Kubernetes Orchestration: Experience installing, configuring, troubleshooting, and scaling production Kubernetes and RKE clusters from the bare-metal layer up.
• Cloud-Native Internals: Familiarity with CNI (Cilium), Service Mesh (Istio), CRI (Cri-O, Docker), and software-defined storage/CSI plugins.
• Platform Customization: Experience developing Kubernetes extensions or patterns, such as custom webhooks, controllers, operators, or sidecars.
• Infrastructure as Code & GitOps: Experience building fully repeatable infrastructure using Ansible (AWX/Tower) and Terraform driven by GitOps principles and automated CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins).
• Development & Scripting: High proficiency in Python and Advanced Bash to develop production-grade software solutions and interface with external systems via RESTful APIs.
• Observability & Telemetry: Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and InfluxDB to support proactive alerting and reliability goals.
• Agile Tooling: Experience using Atlassian platforms (Jira/Confluence) to manage complex product backlogs, lead sprint planning, and orchestrate technical rollouts.

Meet Boingo - named among the Best Places to Work!


Boingo Wireless simplifies complex wireless challenges to connect people, businesses, and things. Our vast footprint of Wi-Fi and cellular networks reaches more than a billion consumers annually. From airports and stadiums to military bases, Boingo helps folks stay connected to the people and things they love.


Our team is creative, collaborative, and on the leading edge of technology. There is no doubt the "secret sauce" to Boingo's success is our incredible team and culture. We take pride in having fun and building awesome products.


Our generous benefits package includes health, dental, vision, 401(k) match, annual bonus plan, unlimited vacation, paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement, and more! It's no wonder we've been named among the Best Places to Work!


Boingo's new headquarters is just steps from The Star District, offering 35 shops, restaurants, and specialty services.


We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or veteran status.


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