Systems Engineering Lead – Infra & Operations

Sonic; Santa Rosa (CA); On-site; USD 187,000 - 207,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

401(k) + Profit Sharing

Paid Time Off

Education opportunities

Growth opportunities

Paid pregnancy/bonding leave

Job summary

Sonic Bay Area, CA based, seeks a senior systems leader to guide a team of engineers and administrators responsible for design, deployment, and operation of the infrastructure across production environments.

The role requires active technical involvement in architecture, tooling, operations, and project execution, with a focus on reliability, security, and cross-functional collaboration with IT, Network, and Software Engineering.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in systems engineering/administration in Linux environments.
• 2-3 years in people management or team lead capacity.
• Deep Linux systems administration at scale (RHEL/CentOS preferred).
• Experience managing multi-service production environments with reliability and availability requirements.
• Experience leading technical projects with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Hands-on virtualization in production (Proxmox VE, VMware).
• Scripting ability in Perl, Python, or shell.
• Knowledge of configuration management and fleet automation (Ansible).
• Networking fundamentals relevant to ISP or network services.
• Monitoring/observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana).
• Ability to evaluate architectural tradeoffs and communicate decisions clearly.

Responsibilities

• Manage and mentor a team of systems engineers and systems administrators.
• Lead hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, and professional development.
• Translate Director's direction into team execution and project plans.
• Plan and drive projects from scoping to delivery, balancing timelines and risks.
• Collaborate with other engineering managers across Technology.
• Foster operational rigor, documentation, and continuous improvement.
• Manage on-call rotations and lead incident response.
• Maintain active technical contribution alongside management duties.

Skills

Team leadership

Linux administration

Proxmox

VMware vSphere

Scripting (Perl/Python/Shell)

Ansible

Networking fundamentals

Project management

Tools

Proxmox VE

VMware vSphere

Ansible

Job description

Sonic Bay Area, CA based, seeks a senior systems leader to guide a team of engineers and administrators responsible for design, deployment, and operation of the infrastructure across production environments.

The role requires active technical involvement in architecture, tooling, operations, and project execution, with a focus on reliability, security, and cross-functional collaboration with IT, Network, and Software Engineering.