Position Overview
The Infrastructure Systems Engineering team maintains and evolves SingleStores private infrastructure and data center environment, including systems that primarily support the companys database test platform. That environment operates at a meaningful scale, running millions of tests per month and writing petabytes of storage data over time, while continuing to expand capacity and reliability requirements.
We are seeking a Sr Manager, Systems Engineering to lead a team responsible for data center operations, infrastructure reliability, and systems orchestration. This role is intended to be a mostly technical manager with hands-on involvement: someone who can guide priorities, coordinate execution, and still dive into architecture, troubleshooting, incident response, and key implementation details when needed.
The right candidate will help shape and operate core infrastructure spanning compute, storage, and networking, while improving the tooling, documentation, and operational discipline needed to scale the environment safely.
Role and Responsibilities
- Lead day-to-day engineering operations for data center and infrastructure systems, with accountability for reliability, maintainability, and execution quality.
- Manage and mentor a small systems engineering team while remaining technically engaged in architecture reviews, troubleshooting, and high-priority operational work.
- Own core infrastructure domains across compute, storage, networking, and orchestration, ensuring they work together as a coherent operating environment.
- Drive operational improvements in data center hardware reliability, installation standards, maintenance planning, and lifecycle management.
- Lead design and continuous improvement of systems and workflows related to provisioning, configuration management, and infrastructure automation.
- Coordinate infrastructure activities with internal partners, contractors, and external vendors to ensure design, deployment, and testing meet operational standards.
- Oversee technical incident response and follow-through, including root cause analysis, repair planning, and systemic reliability improvements.
- Establish and enforce strong engineering discipline around task tracking, documentation, and categorization of work across systems domains.
- Partner with adjacent teams to integrate shared infrastructure, improve visibility into system health, and support broader engineering goals.
- Contribute to hiring, interview processes, and team-building as part of the ongoing development of the systems engineering organization.
Required Skills and Experience
- 7+ years of experience in systems engineering, infrastructure software, platform engineering, or a closely related domain, including meaningful hands-on technical depth.
- 2+ years of experience leading engineers or technical teams in a manager, team lead, or equivalent player-coach capacity.
- Strong experience operating and improving infrastructure in at least several of the following areas: data center systems, storage platforms, network infrastructure, virtualization, and distributed systems.
- Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot complex failures that cross hardware, operating system, networking, and orchestration boundaries.
- Experience designing, implementing, or materially improving infrastructure automation, configuration management, or systems orchestration workflows.
- Hands-on experience with Terraform or comparable infrastructure-as-code tooling for provisioning, change management, and lifecycle management of infrastructure.
- Experience planning or executing the migration of data center services or infrastructure platforms onto Kubernetes, including consideration of networking, storage, deployment, and operational reliability.
- Strong working knowledge of data center networking, structured cabling, device installation, and infrastructure maintenance practices.
- Experience managing technical work through project plans, prioritization, and execution against timelines.
- Comfort working at both system level and implementation detail in at least one deep technical area such as storage, virtualization, kernel-level systems, high-performance computing, or service/platform architecture.
- Proficiency with at least one systems programming language such as C, C++, or Go, plus scripting in Python, Bash, or similar languages.
- Strong command-line fluency and comfort navigating and debugging Unix-like systems.
- Clear communication skills, sound technical judgment, and the ability to lead through collaboration rather than hierarchy alone.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with low-level monitoring, profiling, or performance analysis tools.
- Experience with large-scale storage systems, hardware reliability programs, or infrastructure that supports high-throughput engineering workloads.
- Familiarity with modern infrastructure documentation practices and the use of automation to keep technical specifications and operational knowledge current.
- Experience supporting environments where infrastructure software and physical data center operations are tightly coupled.
- Familiarity with SingleStore or other distributed database systems is a plus.
