Lead Server Engineer
Location: Menasha, WI
Work Arrangement: Hybrid — three days per week onsite
Schedule: Monday–Friday, 8:00 AM–4:00 PM, with on-call responsibilities
Salary: $110,000–$130,000, depending on experience
Bonus: 7.5% target based on company performance
Travel: Approximately 10–15% to local data centers
Employment Requirement: U.S. citizenship required due to ITAR regulations
Position Overview
We are seeking an experienced Lead Server Engineer to provide technical leadership for a large-scale enterprise compute and virtualization environment. This position will architect, manage, secure, and optimize the Intel-based server infrastructure and VMware platforms supporting critical manufacturing, ERP, engineering, and business applications.
This is a hands-on technical leadership position with no direct reports. The ideal candidate will have enterprise data center experience, strong automation and compute expertise, and the ability to lead complex infrastructure initiatives through effective communication and cross-functional collaboration.
Key Responsibilities
Enterprise Compute and Virtualization
- Architect, implement, and support enterprise server and virtualization environments.
- Administer Intel-based server hardware, VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, and related enterprise platforms.
- Design highly available and resilient compute environments for mission-critical applications.
- Manage VMware clusters, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), High Availability (HA), host profiles, virtual networking, and storage integrations.
- Establish standards for server provisioning, configuration, patching, upgrades, remediation, and lifecycle management.
- Develop hardware standards, firmware strategies, capacity plans, and refresh roadmaps.
- Collaborate with storage, networking, backup, cybersecurity, cloud, and application teams.
Infrastructure Operations and Reliability
- Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex server and virtualization issues.
- Lead root-cause analysis and corrective actions for critical infrastructure incidents.
- Monitor platform availability, performance, capacity, security, and overall health.
- Support disaster recovery, fault tolerance, business continuity, and infrastructure resiliency strategies.
- Coordinate maintenance windows, platform upgrades, and infrastructure transitions.
- Develop dashboards, alerts, and operational reporting using enterprise monitoring tools.
- Participate in an on-call rotation to support critical infrastructure needs.
Automation and Infrastructure as Code
- Design and maintain infrastructure automation using tools such as:
- Ansible
- Terraform
- VMware PowerCLI
- PowerShell
- Python
- Automate server provisioning, patching, configuration management, compliance, and remediation.
- Develop repeatable Infrastructure-as-Code solutions that improve consistency and reduce manual processes.
- Support automated testing and deployment processes for infrastructure changes.
- Identify opportunities to improve operational efficiency through automation.
Platform Modernization
- Evaluate and recommend technologies that improve infrastructure scalability, resiliency, and performance.
- Support or maintain familiarity with:
- Hyperconverged infrastructure
- Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services
- Kubernetes and OpenShift
- Hybrid cloud infrastructure
- Container platforms
- Enterprise disaster recovery solutions
- Contribute to infrastructure roadmaps, technical standards, and technology investment planning.
Technical Leadership and Collaboration
- Serve as the subject-matter expert for enterprise server infrastructure and virtualization.
- Provide technical guidance and mentorship to infrastructure team members without direct management responsibility.
- Lead complex infrastructure initiatives and cross-functional technical projects.
- Communicate technical risks, recommendations, and project updates to both technical and business stakeholders.
- Partner with architecture, infrastructure, cybersecurity, cloud, and application teams to gather requirements and deliver reliable solutions.
Required Qualifications
- Five or more years of experience supporting enterprise server, compute, virtualization, or related infrastructure technologies.
- Enterprise-level data center experience.
- Strong experience with Intel-based server infrastructure and VMware environments.
- Experience troubleshooting complex enterprise infrastructure and virtualization issues.
- Hands-on experience with infrastructure automation, scripting, or configuration-management tools.
- Understanding of operating systems, enterprise hardware, monitoring, networking, storage, backup, and disaster recovery.
- Strong analytical, risk-assessment, and problem-solving capabilities.
- Excellent communication, customer service, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
- Ability to lead technical initiatives without direct reports.
- Ability to work onsite in Menasha three days per week.
- Ability to participate in on-call coverage.
- Ability to travel approximately 10–15% to local data centers.
- Must be a U.S. citizen due to ITAR requirements.
Preferred Qualifications
- Seven or more years of experience designing and administering enterprise server and virtualization environments at scale.
- Advanced experience with VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, Aria Operations, HA, and DRS.
- Experience with Ansible, Terraform, VMware PowerCLI, PowerShell, or Python.
- Knowledge of infrastructure lifecycle management, capacity planning, and performance tuning.
- Experience with cloud, container, or hybrid infrastructure technologies, including Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, or OpenShift.
- Previous experience serving as a technical lead, infrastructure architect, or senior engineering subject-matter expert.
Top Qualifications
- Enterprise-level data center and server infrastructure experience.
- Strong compute and infrastructure automation expertise.
- Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.