Manager Systems Engineering

Leadership role responsible for the reliability, performance, security, and lifecycle management of enterprise Linux server, virtualization, storage, backup, and disaster recovery services. The role leads a team of systems engineers while remaining actively engaged in architecture, troubleshooting, operational readiness, major changes, and recovery activities. This leader partners across Infrastructure, Security, Architecture, Application, Database, and Business Continuity teams to deliver stable, scalable, and resilient technology services.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of systems engineers and technical contractors; establish clear priorities, operating standards, accountability, and growth plans.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership across Linux physical and virtual server environments, enterprise compute platforms, shared storage, data protection, replication, and disaster recovery.
• Own service health, capacity, availability, performance, and lifecycle planning for the supported infrastructure portfolio.
• Guide architecture and engineering decisions for new solutions, platform modernization, migrations, upgrades, consolidation, and retirement of legacy infrastructure.
• Lead complex incident response and problem management efforts, including root-cause analysis, corrective actions, and communication with technical and business stakeholders.
• Establish and maintain operational standards for monitoring, patching, configuration, vulnerability remediation, change control, documentation, and support readiness.
• Develop and regularly exercise backup, restoration, failover, and disaster recovery capabilities; document outcomes, risks, dependencies, and corrective actions.
• Partner with application and database teams to translate workload requirements into appropriate compute, storage, protection, availability, and recovery designs.
• Drive automation and repeatable engineering practices that reduce manual effort, configuration drift, and operational risk.
• Manage vendor and service-provider relationships, including solution evaluation, support escalation, renewals, proposals, statements of work, and service-level performance.
• Build and manage capital and operating plans, forecasts, licensing needs, maintenance requirements, and infrastructure investment recommendations.
• Lead cross-functional projects with competing priorities and communicate status, risks, decisions, and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ensure supported platforms align with company security, audit, regulatory, and governance requirements.
• Participate in scheduled maintenance, escalations, and critical recovery events when leadership or advanced technical support is required.

Required Qualifications

• Progressive experience engineering and supporting enterprise infrastructure in complex, highly available environments, including substantial hands-on Linux systems experience.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical teams, mentoring engineers, assigning work, managing priorities, and delivering results through others.
• Strong working knowledge of physical and virtual compute, enterprise Linux administration, storage concepts, backup and recovery, replication, and disaster recovery principles.
• Experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting business-critical infrastructure across geographically separated or hybrid environments.
• Proven ability to lead major incidents, diagnose complex cross-platform issues, and translate findings into sustainable corrective actions.
• Experience with infrastructure lifecycle planning, capacity forecasting, performance management, patching, security remediation, and technology refresh programs.
• Experience developing and validating recovery plans, including restoration testing, failover exercises, dependency mapping, and recovery documentation.
• Working knowledge of automation, scripting, configuration management, or infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Experience managing vendors, support agreements, procurement activities, budgets, and project delivery.
• Ability to communicate technical information clearly to engineers, business partners, vendors, and senior leadership.
• Strong organizational, analytical, documentation, and decision-making skills, with the ability to manage multiple priorities in a production environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting enterprise database, middleware, or application workloads on Linux platforms.
• Experience with hybrid infrastructure and public cloud operating models.
• Experience in a regulated, audited, or large-scale retail enterprise environment.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline, or equivalent relevant experience(10+yrs).

Leadership Expectations

• Balances strategic planning with direct technical engagement and operational ownership.
• Creates clarity during high-pressure incidents and makes risk-based decisions using available facts.
• Builds strong partnerships across teams and addresses ownership, dependencies, and escalation paths early.
• Promotes disciplined engineering, complete documentation, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.
• Develops team depth and succession by distributing knowledge and reducing single points of dependency.

Working Conditions

• Occasional after-hours or weekend support may be required for planned maintenance, critical incidents, and disaster recovery exercises.
• Limited overnight travel may be required to support data center, recovery, vendor, or business needs.
• On-site presence may be required for infrastructure maintenance or recovery activities.

Start Rate = $131,000 to $145,000 based on experience plus a 20% bonus and equity. The company offers Health, Dental, & Vision, a flexible spending account, life and disability insurance benefits, a 401k plan, PTO, paid holidays annually, and an employee stock purchase plan.

Full time500 Volvo Parkway,Chesapeake,Virginia 23320IT EngineeringDollar Tree