The Lead Systems Engineer is a senior individual contributor responsible for the reliability, scalability, and modernization of Intellum's platform infrastructure. Intellum serves large enterprise customers with demanding availability expectations, and this role will help shape the technical direction for how our platform runs, deploys, and scales.
This is a highly hands-on role with significant ownership across infrastructure architecture, cloud environments, deployment systems, observability, and platform reliability. The Lead Systems Engineer will also provide technical leadership across the Systems Engineering function through architecture guidance, mentorship, knowledge sharing, and strong operational standards.
A key focus of this role is continuing to modernize the platform toward portable, container-orchestrated infrastructure, improving deployment and observability capabilities, and maintaining an architecture that can operate effectively across multiple cloud providers.
Responsibilities- Own and drive key infrastructure modernization initiatives, including the continued evolution from legacy compute environments toward modern, container-orchestrated infrastructure while maintaining reliable service for enterprise customers.
- Design and maintain infrastructure as code across multiple cloud providers, ensuring infrastructure decisions support portability, maintainability, and long-term scalability.
- Improve the reliability and maturity of Intellum's CI/CD systems and deployment tooling so releases are efficient, observable, and recoverable.
- Provide technical leadership across the Systems Engineering team through mentorship, architecture guidance, knowledge sharing, and support for strong engineering practices.
- Establish and evolve SLI and SLO practices, along with the monitoring, alerting, and load-testing capabilities needed to support platform reliability.
- Participate in and provide leadership during platform incidents, including troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and follow-through on corrective actions.
- Drive visibility into cloud infrastructure costs and incorporate cost considerations into architecture and infrastructure decisions.
- Improve developer experience by evolving the infrastructure and tooling engineers depend on, including development environments, deployment workflows, and production feedback loops.
- Partner closely with Security and Engineering teams on access controls, infrastructure hardening, compliance requirements, and secure infrastructure practices.
- Identify operational and infrastructure risks early, recommend priorities, and help drive the technical roadmap for the Systems Engineering function.
- Contribute to the continued development of the Systems Engineering team and function, including mentoring engineers and helping build strong technical practices as the organization evolves.
- Perform other duties as assigned.
Required Skills- 8+ years of hands-on experience in infrastructure, DevOps, platform engineering, site reliability engineering, or a related discipline, including experience building and operating production systems.
- Deep hands-on experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting highly available production infrastructure.
- Production experience across more than one major cloud provider, with depth in at least one of AWS or Google Cloud and working fluency in the other.
- Significant experience with container orchestration and Kubernetes in production environments, including cluster operations, workload configuration, reliability, and troubleshooting.
- Experience modernizing production infrastructure, including migrations from VM-based or legacy environments toward containerized or cloud-native architectures.
- Strong infrastructure-as-code experience using Terraform or comparable tooling, with an emphasis on repeatability and automation.
- Experience building, operating, or significantly improving CI/CD systems and deployment infrastructure.
- Strong incident response and troubleshooting capabilities, including experience diagnosing complex distributed-system failures and contributing to effective post-incident review.
- Strong Linux administration skills and scripting or programming ability in Ruby, Python, or a comparable language.
- Experience working in a SaaS environment where reliability, availability, and production stability are critical.
- Ability to collaborate effectively with distributed teams across US and European time zones and participate in an on-call rotation.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to provide technical direction, mentor other engineers, and influence infrastructure decisions across teams.
Preferred Qualifications- Experience operating production infrastructure across both AWS and Google Cloud simultaneously.
- Prior experience leading or managing engineers, whether through formal people management, technical leadership, or mentorship.
- Experience developing engineers and helping build strong, high-performing technical teams.
- Experience with cloud cost management or FinOps practices at meaningful scale.
- Experience managing deployment platforms such as Spinnaker, Jenkins, or comparable tooling.
- Experience operating a Ruby on Rails enterprise application or comparable production codebase.
- Familiarity with SOC 2 or similar compliance frameworks and customer-facing security requirements.
- Working knowledge of AI-assisted development tooling and its infrastructure implications.
- Prior people leadership or management experience in a player-coach capacity, balancing hands-on technical contribution with mentorship, team guidance, and development of engineers.
- Background in learning management systems, learning technologies, or adult education platforms.
Education- Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience. Equivalent experience is genuinely accepted for this role.
BENEFITS- Medical - 100% of employee premiums for selected individual plans
- Dental - 100% of employee premiums covered
- Vision - 100% of employee premiums covered
- LinkedIn Learning
- 401(k) plus matching (US Based Only)
- Flexible PTO
- Calm subscription
- Annual Company Retreat
