Sr Systems & Cloud Operations Engineer

This is a remote position.

Hirezon (Interview Exchange) runs hiring, onboarding and HR forms software for higher education institutions. We are part of the Embrace EdTech portfolio. You will own production uptime, backups and recovery for our platform.

We are looking for an experienced Systems Administrator with strong production operations experience and broader CloudOps capabilities. Your immediate focus will be Hirezon's production environment, where you will own production uptime, infrastructure operations, backups, recovery and operational reliability.

This is a hands-on production role. You will diagnose failures across Windows, SQL Server, infrastructure and Java web applications, recover systems safely, and leave behind runbooks and operational records another engineer can follow.

Beyond day-to-day system administration, you will also help evaluate and improve our infrastructure architecture across private cloud and public cloud environments. This includes capacity planning, infrastructure lifecycle management, right-sizing, cost optimization, resilience, automation and identifying opportunities to simplify or modernize infrastructure.

The role may also contribute to infrastructure and CloudOps initiatives across other Embrace portfolio companies as needed.

Technology you will work with

Private cloud and managed hosting environments such as Rackspace; AWS and Azure; Windows Server and Active Directory; SQL Server; Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat hosting Java web applications; SAML single sign-on; CDN and web application firewall platforms; cloud and object storage; monitoring, security and vulnerability management platforms; and infrastructure automation tooling.

What you will own

• Production availability: Monitoring and alerting, incident triage, production troubleshooting, hosting-provider escalations and participation in the on-call rotation.
• SQL Server operations: Backups and recovery, point-in-time restores, SQL Agent jobs, performance and integrity checks, upgrades, capacity planning and cluster maintenance.
• Backup and disaster recovery: Regular restore and DR testing, offsite and immutable backup integrity, backup key management, and recovery objectives agreed with the business.
• Windows and hosted infrastructure: Windows Server, Active Directory, service accounts, clustering, storage, compute, capacity, lifecycle management and infrastructure documentation.
• Private cloud and CloudOps: Help design and evolve private-cloud and public-cloud infrastructure, including compute, storage, networking, availability, backup and security architecture.
• Infrastructure planning and capacity: Monitor utilization and growth trends, forecast infrastructure needs, identify capacity constraints, and recommend infrastructure changes before they become production issues.
• Infrastructure optimization and cost management: Review hosting and cloud utilization, identify underutilized or oversized resources, evaluate hosting alternatives, and recommend opportunities to improve performance, resilience and cost.
• Infrastructure architecture and modernization: Maintain current-state architecture documentation and help evaluate opportunities to simplify, consolidate, modernize or migrate infrastructure across private cloud and public cloud environments.
• Web and application tier: Apache, Tomcat and Java runtime upgrades; TLS certificates; DNS and domains. Partner with Engineering on SSO, search-service and application infrastructure upgrades, each with a tested rollback.
• Security hardening: WAF and firewall rules built in partnership with the security team. Changes should be narrow, tested and reversible, with customer workflows checked before and after implementation. Apply appropriate hardening baselines to servers and infrastructure services.
• Patching and vulnerability remediation: Regular patch cycles with staged validation, maintenance windows, risk prioritization and rollback plans.
• Access and secrets: Privileged access, MFA, service accounts, certificates and API keys, with regular access reviews and secure operational practices.
• Monitoring, logs and audit evidence: Log collection, operational monitoring, incident evidence, infrastructure evidence for SOC 2 and customer security reviews, and corrective actions tracked through closure.
• Automation and operational standardization: Use PowerShell and other appropriate tools to automate repetitive administration, monitoring, validation, backup and operational tasks. Improve consistency through reusable scripts, checklists and runbooks.
• Architecture, lifecycle and vendors: Maintain infrastructure diagrams, lifecycle records, renewal tracking, vendor SLAs, capacity plans and hosting/cloud cost reviews.

How you will work with others

• Engineering: Engineering owns application code and releases. You own infrastructure and production operations, and work together on cross-layer incidents, releases and architecture changes.
• Security team: Security establishes priorities, standards and policies. You implement, validate and operationalize infrastructure security controls.
• Hosting and cloud providers: You manage operational escalations, understand the architecture of the hosted environments and hold providers accountable to SLAs.
• Embrace portfolio teams: Where appropriate, you may assist other portfolio companies with infrastructure assessments, CloudOps practices, capacity planning, architecture, operational reliability and cost optimization.
• Distributed team: Colleagues work across multiple time zones, so operational handoffs, incident records and runbooks must be clear and written.

Scheduled maintenance and urgent incidents mean some nights and weekends.

Requirements

Must have

• 7+ years administering Windows Server in production for a SaaS, enterprise or hosted application environment.
• Hands-on SQL Server operations including backup chains, restores, point-in-time recovery, Agent jobs, index maintenance, upgrades and clustering. You have personally restored a production database to a point in time.
• Windows failover clustering, Active Directory, Group Policy and service-account dependencies.
• Strong production operations experience, including monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, change management and operational recovery.
• Experience managing compute, storage, networking and capacity in private-cloud, hosted or virtualized infrastructure environments.
• Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat configuration, including TLS and reverse proxy configurations for Java applications.
• DNS, CDN/WAF and certificate management using Cloudflare or similar platforms.
• Strong understanding of WAF and firewall rules, including rule ordering, exceptions, rate limits and false positives.
• Enterprise vulnerability management and patch-management tools and practices.
• SIEM, XDR/MDR and log tooling, including analysis, alert tuning and monitoring.
• PowerShell scripting for administration, automation and operational checks, including logging and error handling.
• Working experience with a public cloud platform such as Azure or AWS, including storage, backup, compute, networking, identity and security concepts.
• Understanding of infrastructure capacity planning, right-sizing, performance optimization and cost optimization.
• Experience evaluating infrastructure architecture and making recommendations around scalability, availability, resilience and lifecycle management.
• Experience with immutable or protected backup storage.
• Prior SOC 2, HECVAT, GovRAMP/StateRAMP or similar audit/compliance work.
• Experience managing hosting, infrastructure or cloud providers against SLAs.
• Calm incident handling and a habit of documenting fixes and turning operational knowledge into runbooks.
• Clear written communication and handoffs across teams and time zones.
• Availability for night/weekend on-call and scheduled maintenance.

Nice to have

• Experience designing or operating private-cloud, VMware, hosted or hybrid-cloud infrastructure.
• Azure and/or AWS architecture experience beyond basic administration.
• Cloud and infrastructure cost-management experience, including right-sizing, reserved capacity, storage-tier optimization and vendor cost analysis.
• Infrastructure-as-Code or configuration-management experience such as Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, Ansible or similar.
• Experience performing infrastructure modernization or cloud-readiness assessments.
• Experience migrating workloads between traditional hosting, private cloud and public cloud.
• SAML SSO using Shibboleth or similar platforms, and search platforms such as Solr or Elasticsearch.
• Enough Java and SQL knowledge to trace an application error into the infrastructure layer and back.
• Automated backup and restore testing.
• Experience building infrastructure dashboards, capacity forecasts or operational health reports.

First 90 days

• Weeks 1 to 2: Learn the Hirezon environment, architecture, runbooks and escalation paths. Join the on-call rotation and run the daily backup and production health review.
• By day 30: Own monitoring and alerting. Complete a point-in-time restore on an isolated server. Own the certificate and domain renewal calendar. Run a patch cycle with validated rollback and participate in a DR exercise.
• By day 60: Deliver a capacity, infrastructure lifecycle and architecture review covering compute, storage, databases, backups, network dependencies and critical infrastructure risks. Identify immediate reliability, performance and cost optimization opportunities.
• By day 90: Produce a prioritized infrastructure improvement plan covering operational reliability, capacity, security, automation and cost optimization. Critical runbooks should be usable by a second operator. Establish monthly reporting for backups, recovery tests, patching, certificates, incidents, capacity and infrastructure health.

Over time, you will also help establish reusable infrastructure and CloudOps practices that can benefit other Embrace portfolio companies.

How we hire

• Expect a conversation about production incidents you personally handled, infrastructure decisions you have made, and a practical recovery and troubleshooting exercise using sample material we supply.
• We may also walk through a sample hosted environment and ask how you would assess its reliability, capacity, architecture, operational risks and cost structure.
• We will ask for references who can speak to your operational ownership. Please do not share confidential information or credentials from another employer.
• Hirezon is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of every background and do not discriminate on any basis protected by law.

Benefits

• Competitive salary commensurate with experience.
• Opportunities for career advancement and professional development.
• Experience collaborating with a diverse, global team.
• Comprehensive Health Benefits to support your wellbeing and peace of mind.