Infrastructure & Cloud Systems Engineer

About This Opportunity

CTI Staffing is partnering with a well-established professional services organization to find an Infrastructure & Cloud Systems Engineer for their IT infrastructure team based in Chicago, IL (hybrid, 3 days onsite). This is a 6-month contract-to-hire opening with two positions available.

This team owns a true hybrid environment: an enterprise on-premises data center alongside a growing Azure footprint. They are investing in automation, Infrastructure as Code, and disaster recovery maturity, and they need engineers who take ownership rather than wait for tickets.

What You'll Do

• Administer and optimize VMware vSphere/vCenter environments, including cluster management, DRS/HA policies, and resource and license optimization
  
• Design, deploy, and maintain Azure infrastructure across compute, networking, storage, and identity, including Entra ID and Conditional Access
  
• Manage enterprise server and composable infrastructure platforms, including firmware baselines, hardware health, and vendor-coordinated lifecycle management
  
• Own SAN/NAS storage administration: LUN provisioning, replication, snapshots, performance tuning, and capacity forecasting
  
• Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, ARM templates, or Bicep, plus CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions
  
• Design, execute, and document disaster recovery and failover tests against defined RTO/RPO targets
  
• Automate patching, provisioning, and compliance workflows using PowerShell, Ansible, Python, or Azure CLI
  
• Participate in on-call rotation and partner with security and development teams as an escalation point
  

Requirements

What You Bring

Must-Have:

• 8+ years of hands-on infrastructure engineering or systems administration in enterprise production environments
  
• Deep VMware vSphere/vCenter expertise: cluster administration, DRS/HA, vSAN, resource management
  
• 5+ years with Microsoft Azure: Compute, Networking, Storage, Entra ID, Key Vault, and hybrid connectivity (ExpressRoute, VPN)
  
• Hands-on experience with enterprise compute platforms and composable infrastructure management tooling
  
• Enterprise storage administration experience (SAN/NAS): LUN management, replication, performance tuning
  
• Infrastructure as Code experience with Terraform or ARM/Bicep and configuration management (Ansible, DSC, or equivalent)
  
• Strong scripting in PowerShell, Python, Azure CLI, or Bash
  
• Proven disaster recovery design and failover testing experience (Zerto, Azure Site Recovery, Veeam, or equivalent)
  
• US Citizenship required
  

Nice-to-Have:

• Azure certifications (AZ-104, AZ-305)
  
• VMware Certified Professional (VCP-DCV)
  
• Enterprise hardware vendor certifications
  
• Experience in regulated or compliance-driven environments (SOC 2, NIST, ISO 27001)
  
• Monitoring and observability platform experience (Azure Monitor, Datadog, SCOM)
  

Technical Environment:

• VMware vSphere/vCenter, Azure, Entra ID, Terraform, ARM/Bicep, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, PowerShell, Ansible, Python, Active Directory, Windows Server, enterprise SAN/NAS storage
  

What Success Looks Like:

• DR/failover tests executed and documented against RTO/RPO targets within the first two quarters
  
• Core provisioning workflows moved to Infrastructure as Code with auditable, repeatable deployments
  
• Measurable cost and license optimization across both virtualization and cloud environments