Staff Infrastructure Automation & Virtualization Engineer

Cadence; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Cadence is seeking an IT Staff Systems Engineer to join the Infrastructure team, focusing on automation and virtualization. You will design, build, and maintain IaC frameworks, collaborate on architecture decisions, and mentor junior engineers to advance automation-first practices.

You will work with Terraform, Ansible, Python, and Bash across on-prem and hybrid cloud environments, including Nutanix, KVM, VMware, and cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure.

Qualifications

• 5-8 years of experience in infrastructure engineering with a strong emphasis on automation and infrastructure-as-code
• Expert-level proficiency in Terraform - writing modular, reusable HCL configurations for multi-environment deployments
• Strong hands-on experience with Ansible for configuration management, idempotent playbooks, and role-based automation
• Proficiency in Python for automation scripting, tooling development, and API integration; Bash scripting for operational tasks
• Production-level experience with at least two virtualization platforms: Nutanix (AHV/Prism/AOS), KVM/QEMU, VMware vSphere/ESXi
• Familiarity with CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins) and GitOps workflows for automation
• Working knowledge of AWS or Azure, including compute, networking, IAM, and hybrid connectivity
• Foundational networking knowledge: VLANs, routing, DNS, load balancing, firewall rules in virtualized environments
• Experience with GitHub or GitHub Enterprise for version control, branching strategies, and pull-request workflows
• Strong communication skills and ability to produce clear technical documentation, runbooks, and architecture diagrams

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain IaC solutions using Terraform and Ansible to automate provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management of compute, storage, and networking resources
• Write and maintain Python and Bash automation scripts to reduce manual overhead, integrate tooling, and support CI/CD pipelines
• Build and manage CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions or equivalent tooling to automate infrastructure deployments, enforce policy-as-code, and streamline testing
• Administer and optimize virtualization platforms including Nutanix (AHV, Prism, AOS), KVM, and VMware vSphere/ESXi, ensuring performance and reliability
• Support hybrid cloud operations across AWS and/or Azure, integrating on-premises infrastructure with cloud services using automation-first practices
• Contribute to infrastructure design discussions, providing input on automation, virtualization, HCI, and cloud integration
• Monitor infrastructure health using observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog), respond to incidents, and drive root-cause analysis
• Develop and maintain documentation for automation frameworks, runbooks, and infrastructure standards for consistency and knowledge sharing
• Participate in security and compliance reviews, applying hardening practices and policy-as-code across pipelines
• Mentor junior engineers through pair programming, code reviews, and knowledge transfer to promote automation-first culture

Skills

Infrastructure automation

DevOps culture

Python scripting

Bash scripting

Terraform

Ansible

HCL / IaC

CI/CD practices

Tools

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

Jenkins

Nutanix AHV/Prism/AOS

KVM

VMware vSphere/ESXi

Terraform

Ansible

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

AWS

Azure

Job description

Cadence is seeking an IT Staff Systems Engineer to join the Infrastructure team, focusing on automation and virtualization. You will design, build, and maintain IaC frameworks, collaborate on architecture decisions, and mentor junior engineers to advance automation-first practices.

You will work with Terraform, Ansible, Python, and Bash across on-prem and hybrid cloud environments, including Nutanix, KVM, VMware, and cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure.