Principal System Administrator

HISTOSONICS•Plymouth, MN

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

HistoSonics is a commercial-stage medtech company advancing the Edison® System, a novel non-invasive sonic beam therapy based on histotripsy. Since receiving FDA De Novo grant for the non-invasive destruction of liver tumors in 2023, the company has progressed beyond initial market entry into commercial expansion, reimbursement momentum, and ongoing clinical and pipeline development. In addition to its current liver tumor indication, HistoSonics is pursuing future indications across multiple applications including kidney, pancreas, prostate, neuro, women’s health, and other significant underserved human health areas, to realize the broader potential histotripsy across multiple disease states and medical specialties. We offer an exciting work culture where cutting-edge science meets real-world application, and each team member’s contribution is important to our success in ensuring our physicians and their patients get what they need most. Location: Plymouth, MN Position Summary (Why this role matters): The Principal System Administrator is the senior-most individual contributor within the HistoSonics System Administration function and is a member of a larger, multi-site IT team that supports HistoSonics as a whole. This is a hybrid position based out of the Plymouth, MN office. The role owns the design, operation, and reliability of the organization’s cloud and on-premises infrastructure, enterprise identity and authentication services, backup and disaster recovery, and environments that support deployed systems in the field. The Principal System Administrator establishes the organization’s observability practice and provides the primary technical execution behind the Information Systems relationship with the AI and R&D Infrastructure team within the CTO organization, a partnership owned by the Senior Director, Information Systems and Security. The role serves as the highest level of technical escalation for Information Systems infrastructure and sets technical direction and standards for the System Administration function.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent experience
10+ years of progressive experience in system administration, infrastructure engineering, or site reliability engineering, including experience above senior level.
Expert-level administration experience with at least one major public cloud platform (AWS or Azure) and intermediate to advanced experience with another, including tenant-level governance such as resource hierarchy, subscription or account structure, management groups, policy-as-code, and landing zone design.
Demonstrated experience operating customer-facing or product production environments that are mission critical, including service level objectives, change control, incident response, and root cause analysis.
Intermediate to expert experience designing and administering observability platforms covering metrics, logs, traces, and alerting; experience with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or comparable dynamic, service-discovery-based tooling is preferred.
Demonstrated DevOps/SRE experience, including infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar), CI/CD pipeline construction, and configuration management, with advanced scripting ability in PowerShell, Python, and Bash.
Experience defining infrastructure standards and reusable modules adopted and applied by teams across an organization.
Advanced administration experience with Windows Server and at least one major Linux distribution, and with enterprise identity including Microsoft 365, Entra ID, SAML federation, conditional access, IGA tooling, and certificate-based authentication.
Experience designing, administering, and testing enterprise backup and disaster recovery solutions; working knowledge of hybrid and cloud networking; and experience making changes within an environment compliant with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 standards.
Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting skills, with sound judgment and composure when responding to incidents affecting production or product-facing systems, and a bias toward automation, standardization, and durable documentation.
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to explain infrastructure decisions, risks, and trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences, and to prioritize tasks and manage time effectively while working independently and as part of a team.
Ability to set technical direction and influence outcomes across teams and departments without direct reporting authority.

Nice To Haves

Experience in a regulated industry such as medical device, healthcare, or manufacturing.
Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, AKS), virtualization platforms (VMware vSphere, Hyper-V), incident escalation tooling such as PagerDuty.
Experience with implementing workflows executed by AI agents for productivity purposes.
Relevant industry certifications are a plus.

Responsibilities

Infrastructure and Cloud Operations: Design, deploy, administer, and maintain the organization’s corporate and product production environments, including compute, storage, networking, identity and access management, and cost governance, along with on-premises server, virtualization, and storage infrastructure. Serve as the primary administrator for the product production environment, including environment design, capacity planning, configuration standards, and ongoing global operational support. Lead the transition of internal systems to be centrally managed by Information Systems, and plan, design, and execute infrastructure buildouts for new and expanded facilities in coordination with Facilities, Networking, and Security stakeholders.
Observability and Reliability: Design, implement, and administer the organization’s monitoring and observability platform, covering metrics, logs, traces, synthetic checks, predictive trending, and alerting across cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Define service level objectives, alert thresholds, and escalation paths for mission-critical and customer-facing systems, and maintain dashboards and reporting on system health, capacity, and performance. Serve as a senior technical responder for major infrastructure incidents, conduct root cause analysis, drive corrective and preventive actions to completion, and participate in an on-call rotation for critical after-hours support.
Automation, Governance, and Standards: Define and maintain infrastructure-as-code for cloud and on-premises resources, along with the CI/CD pipelines and configuration management tooling used to deploy and maintain them, ensuring environments are reproducible, version-controlled, and peer-reviewed. Design, implement, and maintain enterprise-level cloud governance under the direction of the Senior Director, Information Systems and Security, including cloud resource hierarchy, subscription and account management, management group structure, and tenant-level policy. Author and maintain organizational cloud standards for naming, tagging, cost tracking, logging, alerting, and observability, along with reusable infrastructure-as-code templates and policy-driven guardrails for shared use across Information Systems and the CTO organization. Identify and automate manual operational processes, and develop supporting scripts and tooling in PowerShell, Python, or comparable languages.
Security, Compliance, and Resilience: Own the design and administration of enterprise authentication and identity services, including single sign-on, federation, conditional access, certificate-based authentication, and supporting public key infrastructure, and lead the effort to manage SaaS applications under centralized authentication and access governance. Own the design, administration, and testing of backup and disaster recovery solutions for cloud and on-premises systems, including documented periodic recovery exercises. Serve as control owner for assigned IT controls, provide audit evidence, ensure configurations, patching, and hardening standards adhere to organizational IT policies and applicable regulatory requirements, and support computer systems validation for infrastructure in alignment with the HistoSonics Quality Management System.
Technical Leadership and Collaboration: Serve as the final internal escalation point for complex Information Systems infrastructure issues, and provide technical mentorship, design review, and knowledge transfer to System Administrators and IT Support Specialists. Serve as the primary Information Systems technical resource to the AI and R&D Infrastructure team, providing architecture guidance, design review, and escalation support for product and research cloud platform work, including consultation on systems imaging, endpoint baselines, and secrets management. Represent Information Systems infrastructure in architecture reviews, threat modeling sessions, and change control processes, and provide technical input to Security, Data Privacy, Quality, and Regulatory stakeholders on decisions carrying compliance or data implications. Escalate cross-organizational governance conflicts, scope disputes, and resourcing trade-offs to the Senior Director, Information Systems and Security, and evaluate, recommend, and implement infrastructure and SaaS solutions to address business needs, including assessment of functionality, security posture, integration requirements, and licensing costs.