Senior Hybrid Cloud Operations Engineer (Houston)

This role is based in Houston, TX and requires working onsite 2 days per week.

The Senior Hybrid Cloud Operations Engineer independently delivers complex infrastructure and operational work across enterprise data center, on-premises, virtualized, private-cloud, and public-cloud environments. This position combines advanced hands-on infrastructure expertise with automation and production operations and is expected to proactively identify work, take ownership from planning through completion, and resolve complex technical issues without routinely requiring escalation to more senior resources.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Independently identify, plan, prioritize, and deliver infrastructure work from analysis through implementation, validation, documentation, and operational handoff.
• Administer and troubleshoot complex Linux and Windows systems, physical infrastructure, enterprise servers, virtualization, storage, networking, backup/recovery, clustering, and data center technologies.
• Design, develop, maintain, and review production automation using Ansible, Terraform, Bash, Python, Git, APIs, and Infrastructure as Code practices.
• Independently support VMware, OpenStack, Hyper-V, KVM, AWS, or comparable private/public-cloud and virtualization platforms.
• Troubleshoot complex networking, DNS, routing, firewall, load-balancing, TLS, storage, Fibre Channel, SAN/NAS, backup, database, container, web, file-transfer, and messaging issues.
• Independently support and improve monitoring, alerting, security, vulnerability remediation, patching, backup/recovery, disaster recovery, and infrastructure lifecycle processes.
• Evaluate dependencies, risks, testing requirements, security implications, change plans, validation procedures, and rollback strategies before implementing production changes.
• Identify manual processes, technical debt, recurring incidents, and operational inefficiencies and implement sustainable automation and engineering improvements.
• Review infrastructure and automation changes made by other engineers for reliability, security, maintainability, and operational impact.
• Lead technical diagnosis and recovery for complex production incidents and drive appropriate root-cause and preventive actions.
• Provide technical guidance to Engineers and assist with technical escalations.
• Develop and improve runbooks, architecture documentation, standards, monitoring, and operational practices.

NON-ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Lead technical portions of infrastructure migrations, upgrades, hardware refreshes, proofs of concept, and modernization initiatives.
• Assist with technology evaluations, capacity planning, lifecycle planning, and solution design.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing and development of reusable engineering practices.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

REQUIRED SKILLS AND ABILITIES

• Ability to independently own complex infrastructure work from initial analysis through successful production delivery.
• Strong production expertise across Linux, Windows, networking, virtualization, storage, backup/recovery, cloud, security, and infrastructure automation.
• Strong ability to design, troubleshoot, modify, test, and safely deploy Ansible and Terraform automation.
• Ability to determine appropriate boundaries among Terraform, Ansible, scripting, APIs, and operational processes.
• Ability to understand unfamiliar repositories, systems, dependencies, and infrastructure with limited direction.
• Ability to convert manual operational processes into tested, reusable, production-safe automation.
• Ability to identify technical risks, dependencies, failure scenarios, validation requirements, and rollback strategies.
• Ability to review technical work performed by others and provide effective guidance.
• Strong incident-response, root-cause-analysis, documentation, communication, and escalation judgment.

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND/OR EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related discipline preferred.
• Minimum of 5 years of relevant professional experience, including demonstrated experience independently delivering and supporting complex production infrastructure.
• Equivalent combinations of relevant education, technical training, certifications, and demonstrated professional experience may be considered.
• Advanced production experience with Linux, Windows, Ansible, Terraform, networking, Git, and scripting.
• Demonstrated experience independently identifying, planning, and delivering complex infrastructure changes and resolving production issues without routinely requiring escalation.
• Experience across enterprise data center, virtualized, private-cloud, public-cloud, and hybrid-cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with physical server infrastructure and Dell, HPE, or comparable enterprise server technologies.
• Experience with VMware, OpenStack, Hyper-V, KVM, or comparable platforms and public-cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS.
• Experience with Commvault, Veeam, Backup Exec, Barracuda, or comparable enterprise backup technologies.
• Strong knowledge of SAN/NAS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and technologies such as Pure Storage, HPE Nimble, Synology, Brocade, or comparable platforms.
• Strong knowledge of TCP/IP, UDP, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, routing, NAT, MTU, firewalls, load balancing, TLS, and network troubleshooting.
• Knowledge of infrastructure security, vulnerability remediation, patching, certificates, encryption, secrets management, and privileged access management.
• Working knowledge of HAProxy, Apache/Nginx, FTP/SFTP, Postfix/SMTP, MySQL/MariaDB, Docker, Prometheus, Grafana, DNS/BIND, Windows Server Failover Clustering, SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances, or comparable technologies.

OTHER REQUIREMENTS

Must provide after-hours support and participate in on-call or critical escalation activities as appropriate to the position and operational needs.Travel of up to 10% may be required, depending on employee location and business needs, including travel to data centers, offices, or other company locations for infrastructure support, installations, maintenance, incident response, and other operational activities. Travel may occasionally occur outside normal business hours.Must appropriately handle privileged credentials, production data, and sensitive infrastructure information.Must maintain appropriate security, change-management, documentation, source-control, and infrastructure engineering standards.Must communicate technical risks, decisions, dependencies, and recommendations effectively to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

Disclaimer: This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, or qualifications associated with the job. Management reserves the right to modify or reassign job duties as business needs evolve

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Empyrean is an Equal Opportunity Employer: including disability and protected veteran status