Senior Hybrid Cloud Operations Engineer (Houston)

Empyrean Benefit Solutions•Houston, TX

21h•Hybrid

About The Position

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. The role combines advanced hands-on infrastructure expertise with automation and production operations. The engineer proactively identifies work, takes ownership from planning through completion, and resolves complex technical issues without routinely escalating to more senior resources. The position is based in Houston, Texas, and requires onsite work two days per week. It also requires after-hours support and participation in on-call or critical escalation activities as appropriate. Travel of up to 10% may be required, depending on employee location and business needs. The engineer may lead technical work for infrastructure migrations, upgrades, hardware refreshes, proofs of concept, and modernization initiatives; assist with technology evaluations, capacity and lifecycle planning, and solution design; and facilitate knowledge sharing and reusable engineering practices. Other duties may be assigned.

Requirements

Ability to independently own complex infrastructure work from initial analysis through successful production delivery.
Strong production expertise across Linux, Windows, networking, virtualization, storage, backup and 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.
Minimum of 5 years of relevant professional experience, including demonstrated experience independently delivering and supporting complex production infrastructure.
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.
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.
Must provide after-hours support and participate in on-call or critical escalation activities as appropriate.
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.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related discipline is preferred.
Experience with AWS is preferred.
Equivalent combinations of relevant education, technical training, certifications, and demonstrated professional experience may be considered.

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 and 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-cloud, 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 and 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.
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.
Provide after-hours support and participate in on-call or critical escalation activities as appropriate to the position and operational needs.
Handle privileged credentials, production data, and sensitive infrastructure information appropriately.
Maintain appropriate security, change-management, documentation, source-control, and infrastructure engineering standards.
Communicate technical risks, decisions, dependencies, and recommendations effectively to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.