About the role

This is not a corporate help-desk or a static office IT admin role. At THUMBWAR, our hybrid infrastructure kit is our product. We operate in the high-stakes, zero-downtime world of live sports broadcasting and premium media production, where our customers rely on us to deliver critical broadcast workflows for air.

We plan and test rigorously before a kit ever leaves the shop - together, in a shared shop and engineering space where we sketch, argue, and build side by side. Every argument gets heard and thought through before a decision is made, but once we've decided, we move as one unified front. We don't relitigate a call after the fact, even if it wasn't the one you argued for.

The work itself means stitching together disparate networking, broadcast media, and cloud technologies. You won't walk in knowing every one of them cold. What you will bring is a disciplined approach to solving each one, pulling in subject-matter expertise from across THUMBWAR and our partner network, and codifying what you learn into tooling the whole team can reuse.

The work doesn't stop at the shop door. We are involved in some of the largest live sporting events in the world, and that's where we do our best learning - pulling real-time data from the infrastructure itself and real-time feedback from the customers and crews relying on it. Taking feedback well - without getting defensive - is part of the job, not a soft skill on the side. We won't be perfect every show. What matters is that we take what we hear, organize it into real action items, communicate the plan, and make the next show better than the last.

If you're the person who reaches for a playbook instead of a notebook of tasks, who wants your fingerprints on both the rack and the repo, and who thinks a live broadcast is the best possible stress test for your automation - this is your next step.

Key Responsibilities

• Automate the Full Kit Lifecycle: Build and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) pipelines using Terraform and Ansible to take our fly-pack and facility kits from initial build and configuration through deployment, validation, and teardown. Everything we build must be repeatable, versioned, and documented.
• Codify Virtualization & Compute: Manage and automate our hypervisor platforms, with a primary focus on Proxmox. Ensure provisioning, scaling, and performance tuning are driven entirely by pipelines and configuration management rather than manual GUI clicks.
• Build Show-Day Observability: Design and maintain active monitoring and alerting telemetry (network health, hypervisor performance, storage throughput) for live events so that edge cases and anomalies are surfaced and diagnosed before they ever threaten air.
• Physical Hardware Ownership: Rack, cable, stack, and troubleshoot physical server hardware, enterprise switches, and high-performance storage arrays. Automation starts with hardware you understand and respect at the bare-metal level.
• Support Zero-Failure Execution: Support live event schedules on-site or remotely. Use the automation tooling and pipelines you've built to proactively monitor, rapidly diagnose, and swiftly resolve real-time infrastructure or hypervisor issues under tight production deadlines.

The Ideal Candidate

• You Automate First, But Build Real Things: Your default instinct is to write a script, playbook, or pipeline over applying a manual fix - but you are equally comfortable running clean fiber patches or lifting a 2U server into a road case.
• You Own the Outcome: You don't just identify a problem and pass the ticket down the line. You diagnose the root cause, automate the fix, and document the solution so it never requires human intervention a second time.
• You Dare to Suggest Better: You actively challenge "this is how we've always done it" thinking. If an open-source tool, a pipeline tweak, or an architectural adjustment saves time or budget, you build the business case, design with the team, and ship it.
• You True-Up Your Skills: You don't hide behind acronyms on a resume. You are confident enough in your engineering fundamentals to sit at a terminal and prove your knowledge in a practical environment. AI-assisted coding and automated workflows are core to how you already operate, not a future stretch skill.

Required Technical Qualifications

• Automation & IaC: Hands-on experience with ITerraform and Ansible to repeatedly provision, configure, and tear down environments.
• Scripting Proficiency: Practical experience scripting workflows (Bash, Python, or Typescript) to eliminate repetitive tasks, with a demonstrated comfort using AI-assisted tools to accelerate development.
• Virtualization Mastery: Experience managing hypervisors (Proxmox or enterprise VMware) including hypervisor-to-network integration (mapping VLANs, trunk ports, and bridges to compute nodes).
• Network Fundamentals: Core CCNA-level routing and switching knowledge. Solid understanding of Layer 2/Layer 3 technologies.
• CI/CD & Version Control: Experience using Git-based workflows and at least one CI/CD or pipeline tool (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins) to deploy and validate infrastructure code changes.
• Schedule & Physical Demands: Absolute flexibility to work non-traditional schedules aligned with live sports and entertainment broadcasts (evenings, weekends, event-driven timelines). Physical ability to lift, rack, and install server and network equipment.

Preferred Technical Qualifications

• Telemetry & Observability: Experience building dashboard environments using Prometheus, Grafana, or similar stacks.
• Containers & Orchestration: Familiarity with Docker, container orchestration, and exposure to GitOps-style deployment patterns.
• Storage & Media Workflows: Familiarity with ZFS, file-sharing protocols (SMB, NFS), advanced storage networking (RDMA, RoCE, iSCSI, cluster file systems), or prior experience in live broadcast television and post-production environments.
• Network Fundamentals: Hands-on experience with OSPF and BGP.
• Advanced Networking: Solid understanding of Multi-VRF design, route leaking, Linux networking (bridges, bonds), and OpenVSwitch.
• Overlay Networks: Experience configuring or troubleshooting VXLAN environments.
• Security Connectivity: Practical experience deploying secure VPN tunnels using tools like WireGuard or Tailscale.
• Cloud Familiarity: Working knowledge of a public cloud provider (e.g., AWS) - as a complement to on-prem/hardware expertise, not a substitute for it.
• Industry Context: Prior experience working within broadcast television, live production environments, or post-production facilities.

Our Interview Process: Come Ready to Build

We don't do whiteboard brain-teasers or trick trivia questions. After an initial conversation to align on cultural fit, operational philosophy, and career trajectory, your technical evaluation will be 100% hands-on.

We design a practical, terminal-based assessment tailored exactly to what you claim to know:

If you tell us you are strong with Ansible, we will hand you a broken playbook and ask you to fix and extend it. If you say you understand Layer 3 networking, we will give you two misconfigured switches and ask you to establish adjacency.

We want to see how you troubleshoot, how you write code, and how you think when things don't go according to script.

Ready to step out of the sidelines and into the action? Let's talk.