Systems Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Title: Systems Engineer

Location: Remote (Ohio or Indiana residents only), on site about once a month

Employment type: Full time

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Remote-first systems engineering with real hardware behind it: on site about once a month, and rarely on a plane. Virtual Sprout is a three time Inc. 5000 cybersecurity and managed services company, delivering enterprise-grade IT and security to small and mid-sized organizations across highly regulated industries, and operating and securing customer environments in the US and globally. Right now we are at the tail end of a full migration off VMware and vCloud Director onto VergeIO, a KVM-based private cloud platform, across the five data centers including Ohio, Indiana, and Las Vegas.

We look for engineers who enjoy working across systems, networking, cloud, and cybersecurity rather than being siloed into a single discipline. Our team is deliberately small and broad, which means ownership and a lot of variety. Our growth comes from technical excellence, security-first design, and operational maturity, which in practice means the controls we build must line up with our regulatory and insurance requirements, not just work.

You must live in Ohio or Indiana. Nearly all on-site work is in Ohio with some in Indiana, so you need to be within driving distance of Central Ohio. Expect to fly to our Las Vegas data center rarely, on the order of once a year or less. Our two overseas clouds are managed entirely remote, so there is no international travel and no passport required. The company pays for all travel.

What you get

- Four weeks PTO

- 401(k) with a 4% dollar-for-dollar company match.

- Strong health care, dental, and vision.

- Company-paid life and AD&D insurance

- Remote-first. On site at a data center roughly once a month or less.

- On-call about one week in four, often lighter, shared across the whole team.

- Certification bonuses. We pay you when you earn one, and we pay for the testing.

- Adoption assistance** up to $5,000 per qualified adoption.

- A real support bench at no cost to you: confidential counseling for you and your family (in person or virtual, plus the Calm app), 24/7 caregiver support for anyone you consider family, a 24/7 health care concierge who will fight your billing and claims disputes, unlimited financial coaching, free attorney consultation and will creation, commuter benefits, and a member discount marketplace.

The work

You are the escalation point for compute, storage, and data protection across five data centers, for customer environments and our own. Tier 1 and tier 2 sit in front of you, so the problems that reach you are the ones worth your attention.

Day to day, you will:

- Run the Microsoft stack that most of our customers live in: Windows Server, Active Directory, Microsoft 365, Entra ID, endpoint management, DNS, DHCP, and patching.

- Support the customer workloads we run in Azure, a modest but growing part of the estate. There is room here to help build that practice rather than inherit it.

- Operate our VergeOS (KVM) platform and finish off the last of the VMware and vCloud Director migration.

- Provision and troubleshoot enterprise storage on Pure Storage and Infinidat.

- Run Veeam and Zerto backup and disaster recovery, and prove the restores on a real schedule.

- Help sharpen how backup and DR works on a KVM platform when both products were built for vSphere. This is a genuinely interesting problem and you get architecture support, not a blank sheet and good luck.

- Build and keep infrastructure secure: hardening, least privilege, secure access, and making sure segmentation and access controls actually hold up on the compute and storage you own.

- Automate the repetitive work with Rewst, PowerShell, Bash, and Python.

- Run project work alongside the escalations: builds, migrations, upgrades, and new customer onboardings.

- Write clear root cause analyses and join escalation calls. You will not own accounts or sit in customer reviews.

- Create SOP's and define help define our processes.

What we need

1. 5+ years running production virtualization. VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, KVM, Proxmox, oVirt/RHV, Nutanix AHV, or OpenStack all count equally.

2. Deep Microsoft infrastructure: Windows Server, Active Directory, Microsoft 365, Entra ID, endpoint management, DNS, DHCP, and patching. Plus competent Linux, which you will need for the VergeOS and KVM layer. Microsoft is where we need the depth; on Linux we need someone comfortable at the command line and willing to get deeper.

3. Storage and data protection fundamentals: block storage provisioning, masking, snapshots, replication, and multipathing on any array, plus real backup and disaster recovery experience including actually restoring things under pressure. We are moving more to hyper-converged but have legacy storage platforms still in production.

4. A working understanding of secure infrastructure. Hardening, segmentation concepts, secure access, and least privilege, and a clear grasp of how security controls land on compute and storage. You are not the security owner here, but security touches every piece of infrastructure you will operate, and understanding it is table stakes for a systems engineer today.

5. Scripting in PowerShell, Bash, or Python at a real working level.

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience . We mean the second half of that sentence.

Two more things we screen for that are not on the list above. You are self-motivated and organized enough to run your own day without anyone checking on you, because that is what makes remote-first actually work. And you can explain a technical problem clearly, in writing and out loud, to a customer who is not technical. Most of our customers are mid-market, so on the other end of an escalation is often a small IT team or a non-technical owner.

Nice to have, and we will train you

VergeIO/VergeOS (we assume you have never seen it), Pure Storage, Infinidat, Veeam, Zerto, deeper Linux, Azure, prior MSP, MSSP, or hosting experience, hypervisor migration experience, and exposure to compliance frameworks in regulated environments. AZ-800, AZ-801, Veeam VMCE, RHCSA, and VCP-DCV all carry weight with us. No certification is required to apply.

Apply

Send us your resume. If you have automation work you are proud of, point us at it. We will talk about base salary openly and early, so nobody's time gets wasted.

If what you want is real infrastructure, real security challenges, and real customer environments rather than a ticket queue, this is that job.

Virtual Sprout, a three time Inc 5000 company, is leading the Cyber Security Industry as one of the fastest growing IT Services firms in the USA. As a nationwide leader, we offer our team the utmost in career advancement and opportunities for growth.

Company Description

Virtual Sprout, a three time Inc 5000 company, is leading the Cyber Security Industry as one of the fastest growing IT Services firms in the USA. As a nationwide leader, we offer our team the utmost in career advancement and opportunities for growth.