Senior Systems Engineer

Classification: Contract Contract Length: 12 months Location: Nashville, TN

Position Summary:

The Senior Systems Engineer is a senior technical contributor responsible for the design, engineering, deployment, lifecycle management, and advanced support of enterprise private cloud infrastructure supporting a large, complex, multi-site environment. This position requires strong hands-on expertise with VMware vSphere and Nutanix AHV, including infrastructure design and build, cluster deployment, virtualization networking, lifecycle management, workload migrations, performance analysis, automation, and advanced troubleshooting. The engineer will independently lead complex infrastructure initiatives from requirements and design through implementation, validation, documentation, and transition to operations. The role requires the ability to work through ambiguous technical requirements, identify risk, develop appropriate solutions, and coordinate activities across infrastructure teams, application owners, vendors, and business stakeholders. The Senior Systems Engineer also serves as a senior escalation resource for production incidents and participates in an on-call rotation supporting business-critical infrastructure. Strong technical judgment, ownership, communication, documentation, and the ability to operate effectively in high-impact situations are essential. Responsibilities

Design, build, configure, and maintain enterprise VMware vSphere and Nutanix AHV private cloud infrastructure. Engineer and deploy Nutanix environments, including hardware bring-up, Foundation imaging, cluster creation, AHV configuration, networking, and production-readiness validation. Design and support VMware environments including ESXi, vCenter, virtual networking, vSphere Distributed Switches (vDS), Standard Switches (vSS), storage integration, and associated virtualization services. Perform advanced troubleshooting across the virtualization stack, including virtual machines, hypervisor hosts, compute, storage, networking, and underlying hardware. Lead technical recovery during high-severity infrastructure incidents, including stabilization, root-cause analysis, remediation, communication, and follow-up documentation. Plan and execute AOS, AHV, ESXi, firmware, and related platform lifecycle activities with appropriate maintenance sequencing, risk mitigation, validation, and rollback planning. Design and execute workload and infrastructure migrations, including VMware-to-AHV/AHV-to-VMware, P2V, infrastructure refresh, and data-center or site migrations. Develop migration plans that include discovery, dependency identification, cutover criteria, validation, application-owner coordination, fallback strategies, and post-migration support. Develop and maintain standardized server and virtualization images, build processes, configuration standards, and deployment procedures. Develop scripts and automation that improve deployment speed, operational consistency, reliability, and scalability while reducing manual effort and implementation risk. Analyze infrastructure performance, capacity, utilization, and system health to identify constraints, emerging risks, and opportunities for improvement. Create and maintain engineering designs, architecture diagrams, build guides, implementation procedures, operational runbooks, standards, and knowledge-transfer documentation. Serve as a technical liaison to supported divisions, partnering with local and enterprise teams to resolve infrastructure issues and maintain consistent enterprise standards. Lead technical workstreams and infrastructure projects, proactively identifying and communicating risks involving requirements, dependencies, schedules, and implementation activities. Evaluate new infrastructure technologies and capabilities and develop recommendations, standards, and implementation approaches where appropriate. Provide technical mentoring and knowledge transfer to engineers and operations personnel. Provide Level 3 escalation support for complex production issues and participate in the team on-call rotation.

Requirements:

5+ years of enterprise infrastructure engineering experience supporting large-scale production environments. Strong hands-on experience with VMware vSphere/ESXi and Nutanix AHV. Experience designing, building, configuring, and troubleshooting virtualization clusters in production environments. Experience with Nutanix cluster deployment and configuration, including Foundation, Prism, AOS, AHV, networking, storage, and lifecycle operations. VMWare to AHV hypervisior migration a plus Strong understanding of VMware architecture including vCenter, ESXi, vDS/vSS networking, snapshots, storage, HA, DRS, and cluster operations. Certification (Preferred)-Nutanix NCP/NCM, VMware VCP/VCAP, Cisco, ITIL, or other relevant infrastructure, automation, or cloud certifications. Equivalent demonstrated technical experience may be considered.