Systems Engineering Manager

Systems Engineering Manager

Bay Area, CA

Why Sonic?

Since 1994, Sonic has been committed to building a faster, more affordable internet, and to hiring the nicest people around. We are looking for exceptional employees who want to challenge the industry for the better by putting members first and offering accessible connectivity for everyone. Foster your personal growth, develop your career, and make a difference in an industry where honest business practice has become optional. Every career opening at Sonic is an opportunity to join a dedicated team where each department works closely together with one another. Join a community-minded company that empowers the growth of a better internet one home, one business, one employee at a time.

Position Title: Systems Engineering Manager

Department: System Operations

Reports To: System Architect

FLSA Status: Full-Time, Exempt, Benefited

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

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.

Key Responsibilities

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
• 23 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

Work Environment:

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate.

Physical Demands:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

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.

Equal Opportunity:

Sonic is an equal opportunities employer and positively encourages applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates regardless of race, color, religion or belief, sex, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, pregnancy or maternity, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Acknowledgement:

Sonic is an at-will employer. The job description does not constitute an employment agreement, or contract, between the employer and employee and is subject to change. Other functions may be assigned and/or reassigned by the employer as the needs of the employer and requirements of the job change. The only employment contract that exists between you and Sonic is that of at-will employment. Employee signature below constitutes employee's understanding of the requirements, essential functions and duties of the position.