Senior Staff DevOps Engineer

Sonatus•Sunnyvale, CA

3h•Hybrid

About The Position

At Sonatus, we’re driving the transformation to AI-enabled software-defined vehicles. Traditional automotive software methods can’t keep pace with consumer expectations shaped by the mobile industry—where features evolve rapidly, update seamlessly, and improve continuously. That’s why leading OEMs trust Sonatus to accelerate this shift. Our technology is already in production across more than 6 million vehicles on the road today and rapidly expanding. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, with 250+ employees worldwide, Sonatus combines the agility of a fast-growing company with the scale and impact of an established partner. Backed by strong funding and proven by global deployment, we’re solving some of the most interesting and complex challenges in the industry. Join us and help redefine what’s possible as we shape the future of mobility. Role Summary: Sonatus builds the software platform for AI-enabled, software-defined vehicles. Our engineering teams produce firmware and system images that run on physical automotive hardware — ECUs, and evaluation boards — not cloud microservices. We are looking for a Sr. Staff DevOps Engineer to own and modernize the global lab infrastructure that makes this work possible: bare-metal build servers, enterprise storage, lab networking, and the automation layer that ties it all together across three sites (Sunnyvale, Seoul, and Dublin). This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will define the infrastructure-as-code strategy for an environment that currently runs on manual processes, build the observability and automation that replaces reactive firefighting, and mentor an existing team into modern DevOps engineering practices. You will be the technical authority for how our physical infrastructure is provisioned, configured, monitored, and scaled.

Requirements

10+ years in infrastructure, DevOps, or SRE roles, with meaningful time spent on physical and bare-metal infrastructure — not exclusively cloud-native environments
Infrastructure as Code — Deep hands-on experience with Terraform and Ansible (or equivalent provisioning and configuration management tools). You've migrated environments from manual to codified, not just maintained existing IaC
Linux systems administration — You can debug a production server over SSH: networking, storage, process management, systemd, log analysis. This is a daily skill, not a resume line
CI/CD platform administration — Experience operating Jenkins at scale (multiple controllers, distributed agents, shared libraries) or equivalent enterprise CI/CD platform. You understand the platform layer, not just pipeline syntax
Enterprise networking — Working knowledge of VLANs, DNS administration (BIND, dnsmasq, or similar), VPN and site-to-site connectivity, and how lab networks integrate with cloud environments
Mentorship — Demonstrated ability to drive adoption of engineering practices across a team. You've raised the floor, not just the ceiling
Multi-site operations — Experience working across geographically distributed infrastructure with different local constraints

Nice To Haves

NFS or SAN storage administration (Pure Storage, NetApp, or similar enterprise arrays)
Embedded systems build toolchains (Yocto, Bazel, cross-compilation environments)
Observability stack experience (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana)
Automotive, robotics, or hardware-in-the-loop test infrastructure

Responsibilities

Build infrastructure reliability — Own the availability, performance, and capacity planning for bare-metal Jenkins controllers and build agents across three global lab sites. These are rack servers, managed switches, and NFS storage arrays — real hardware that builds real firmware.
Infrastructure as Code — Lead the migration from manual configuration to codified infrastructure. Terraform for provisioning, Ansible for configuration management. The current baseline is zero IaC — you will design the target state and the migration path to get there.
Hybrid networking — Own the lab network layer: VLANs, internal DNS zone administration, VPN and Transit Gateway connectivity between sites, and lab-to-cloud routing. You will be the person who understands how packets move between a build agent in Sunnyvale and a test board in Seoul.
Storage architecture — Design and operate the NFS storage layer (Pure Storage FlashArray) for build workspaces, artifact caching, and test output persistence. Define the policy layer: volume provisioning, snapshot strategy, capacity alerting, and lifecycle management.
CI/CD platform infrastructure — Own the platform that pipelines run on: agent provisioning, credential management, controller health, and capacity planning. You share ownership of pipeline architecture with the DevOps Manager and existing staff, but the infrastructure underneath is yours.
Observability — Instrument the build and lab infrastructure with OpenTelemetry. Define SLOs, build dashboards, and create alerting that replaces the current model of "someone notices it's broken."
Hardware test infrastructure — Contribute to the strategy for board reservation, ECU test automation, and the integration points between CI/CD pipelines and physical test hardware.