Senior Systems Engineer

Rocket Companies•Detroit, MI

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Systems Engineer designs, builds, and integrates server and platform infrastructure to ensure the stability, integrity, and efficient operation of systems supporting core organizational functions. Senior Engineers lead medium-to-large initiatives that span multiple teams within the organization, raise delivery quality through automation and standards, and partner with developers and stakeholders to deliver end-to-end solutions. They apply AI tools to accelerate build, run, and documentation workflows while validating outputs for safety and compliance. This role will help shape the next generation of Rocket’s Data Platform infrastructure. Our team supports critical data, analytics, and integration platforms across AWS, on-premises systems, and enterprise data services. We are looking for an engineer who is excited to help us evolve from traditional infrastructure support toward a platform engineering model focused on automation, observability, secure self-service, reusable patterns, AI-assisted operations, and cloud-based data infrastructure best practices. The ideal candidate will be comfortable supporting today’s systems while helping build the tools, standards, documentation, and guardrails that make tomorrow’s infrastructure faster, safer, easier to operate, and easier for partner teams to consume.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in workstation or server administration
3+ years of experience in systems engineering delivering production solutions
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
Proficiency with Microsoft Office; familiarity with documentation and work management tools (e.g., Confluence/Jira)
Strong scripting/automation skills (PowerShell, Bash) and at least one higher-level language (.NET, Python, or Go)
Solid knowledge of Windows and Linux servers, virtualization, and containerization (e.g., Kubernetes/Docker)
Knowledge of networks including SAN/LAN, load balancing, and hybrid connectivity (VPN/Direct Connect/ExpressRoute)
Experience operating in AWS and at least one additional cloud (Azure or GCP) plus on-prem data center environments
Practical experience using AI-powered tools (copilots, LLM automations, chatops) with attention to security and data governance
Infrastructure as Code skills (Terraform, CloudFormation/Bicep) and CI/CD for infrastructure and configurations
Observability tooling experience (logs, metrics, traces) and reliability concepts (SLOs, error budgets)
Knowledgeable in code development practices or equivalent enterprise application integration experience
Experience supporting production infrastructure in hybrid environments, including cloud and on-premises systems, with a working understanding of networking, identity, access, and connectivity fundamentals.
Demonstrated automation mindset, including the ability to identify manual or repetitive processes and improve them through scripting, Infrastructure as Code, configuration management, CI/CD tooling, or other repeatable solutions.
Ability to apply security, access control, change management, documentation, validation, and operational readiness practices when delivering infrastructure changes.

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting data platforms, analytics infrastructure, ETL/ELT systems, reporting platforms, data lakes, data warehouses, or high-throughput database environments.
Experience building reusable infrastructure patterns, self-service workflows, automated runbooks, service catalog items, observability capabilities, Kubernetes/container platforms, or other internal platform capabilities.
Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools to support scripting, documentation, troubleshooting, testing, incident triage, or change planning while protecting sensitive data.

Responsibilities

Lead design and implementation of platform solutions that meet organizational outcomes and non-functional requirements
Contribute to reference architectures and review designs for reliability, performance, and cost within the organization
Drive deep-dive investigations and root-cause analyses for complex issues; implement preventative patterns and guardrails
Collaborate with developers and clients to deliver solutions on Windows and Linux platforms, including .NET-based workloads
Manage and improve the engineering toolchain for the org (source control, CI/CD, packaging, artifact management)
Design and operate solutions across AWS, a second cloud (Azure or GCP), and on-prem environments for organizational workloads
Engineer resilient hybrid connectivity and data services (e.g., transit gateways, private link, SD-WAN, SAN/NAS/NVMe-oF where applicable)
Recommend workload placement based on performance, cost, compliance, and latency; document decision records for the org
Implement consistent identity, secrets, and policy patterns across clouds and data centers
Implement Infrastructure as Code and configuration management to deliver repeatable, auditable environments
Use AI copilots and agents to speed scripting, documentation, testing, incident triage, and change planning while validating outputs
Build or integrate AI-powered internal tools (chatops, knowledge retrieval, automated runbooks) with appropriate logging and guardrails
Promote safe AI use practices including data classification, prompt hygiene, redaction, and auditability within the organization
Define and track SLIs/SLOs for owned platforms; build actionable alerts and dashboards for organizational visibility
Perform capacity planning, performance engineering, resilience testing, and disaster recovery exercises for org services
Apply security best practices with least privilege, encryption, patching baselines, and policy-as-code in collaboration with Security and Risk
Provide tier-3 support, participate in on-call rotations, and continuously improve incident response with automation
Create reusable modules, images, and patterns that other teams in the organization can adopt
Lead org-level working sessions, brown bags, and Communities of Practice to share knowledge and uplift standards
Optimize cost and efficiency for org platforms (rightsizing, autoscaling, reservation strategies, lifecycle policies) and share outcomes
Mentor systems engineers; provide technical coaching, code and design reviews, and support onboarding