Systems Engineering Manager

Sonic Internet + Phone•Santa Rosa, CA

2d•$187,000 - $207,000•Onsite

About The Position

Leads a team of systems engineers and systems administrators responsible for the design, deployment, ongoing operation, and delivery of infrastructure and systems projects across Sonic’s production environment. This is a hands-on technical leadership role managing a small team of systems engineers and systems administrators. The manager is expected to remain an active technical contributor — participating directly in architecture, tooling, operations, and project execution — on the direction set by the Director of Engineering and Architecture and growing the team’s capabilities.

Requirements

7+ years of hands-on experience in systems engineering, systems administration, or infrastructure engineering roles in a Linux-primary environment
2–3 years in a people management or team lead capacity
Deep familiarity with Linux systems administration at scale — RHEL/CentOS lineage preferred
Demonstrated experience managing complex, multi-service production environments with real reliability and availability requirements
Demonstrated experience leading technical projects with cross-functional stakeholders, including planning, prioritization, execution, and delivery
Hands-on experience with virtualization platforms, specifically Proxmox VE and VMware vSphere, in a production capacity
Strong scripting ability; comfort reading and writing Perl, Python, or shell in a production context
Working knowledge of configuration management and fleet automation tools (Ansible or equivalent)
Solid grounding in networking fundamentals (DNS, SMTP, TCP/IP) relevant to an ISP or network services context
Experience with monitoring and observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, or similar)
Ability to evaluate architectural tradeoffs and communicate technical decisions clearly

Responsibilities

Manage and mentor a team of systems engineers and systems administrators across a range of disciplines
Lead hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, and professional development
Execute goals and priorities as set by the Director, translating direction into team execution
Plan, prioritize, and drive projects from scoping through delivery, balancing timelines, dependencies, and operational risk
Collaborate and coordinate with peer engineering managers across Technology (IT, Network Engineering, and Software Engineering) to align on shared infrastructure, cross-functional projects, and organizational priorities
Foster a culture of operational rigor, documentation, and continuous improvement
Manage effective on-call rotations and lead incident response
Functions as a player/coach: maintains active technical contribution alongside management responsibilities, including participation in architecture decisions, tooling development, and operational response
Share responsibility for the reliability, availability, security, and performance of production systems across a large, heterogeneous Linux fleet
Participate in and help drive fleet lifecycle management including OS upgrades, patching cadence, hardware refresh, and configuration management (Ansible and related tooling)
Drive capacity planning and resource allocation across bare-metal, Proxmox, and VMware virtualized environments
Maintain and evolve monitoring, alerting, and log aggregation infrastructure (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Loki/Alloy)
Provide technical oversight for critical services including mail infrastructure (SMTP/IMAP, filtering, delivery), DNS (authoritative and recursive), billing and provisioning systems, and internal APIs and tooling
Ensure systems meet the operational requirements of an ISP serving residential and business subscribers
Evaluate and guide architectural decisions on service reliability, scalability, and maintainability
Define and enforce standards for access management, change control, secrets management, and system hardening
Drive continuous improvement of the organization’s default security posture and incident response capabilities
Support audit and compliance requirements relevant to a payment-processing and subscriber-data environment
Champion automation of operational workflows including provisioning, configuration drift detection, and fleet state management
Maintain and extend internal tooling written in Perl, shell, and other languages appropriate to the environment
Evaluate and adopt new tools pragmatically, with preference for solutions that integrate well with existing on-prem infrastructure
Partner with network engineering, software development, and business stakeholders to align infrastructure with organizational needs
Manage vendor relationships, hardware procurement, and third-party service integrations
Communicate system status, incidents, and strategic plans clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences