Principal Systems Engineer - IaaS/ Hardware

MARA is redefining the future of sovereign, energy-aware AI infrastructure. We’re building a modular platform that unifies IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS which will enable governments, enterprises, and AI innovators to deploy, scale, and govern workloads across data centers, edge environments, and sovereign clouds. 

MARA is seeking a Principal IaaS Engineer to lead the architecture, standardization, and modernization of our global infrastructure-as-a-service platforms. This role blends hands-on technical leadership with strategic platform vision—defining the next generation of hybrid and cloud-native infrastructure across compute, storage, and networking domains. The Principal IaaS Engineer will partner closely with platform, data, and security teams to deliver high-availability, secure, and cost-optimized environments that power MARA’s mission-critical workloads. 

The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in Infrastructure as Code (IaC), private and public cloud integration, and scalable datacenter operations. This individual will serve as a technical authority on multi-cloud architecture, automation frameworks, and high-performance storage and networking systems.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Architect and evolve the company’s IaaS platform across hybrid environments (on-premise, distributed), enabling secure and scalable compute foundations.
• Design, build, and maintain infrastructure automation frameworks using Terraform, Pulumi, and Ansible, including development of custom providers and modules.
• Define and enforce engineering standards for infrastructure provisioning, networking, and observability to ensure reliability, security, and consistency.
• Lead evaluation and integration of core technologies including OpenShift, Kubernetes, MAAS, and Ceph to optimize performance, cost, and maintainability.
• Drive multi-tenant PaaS initiatives and private cloud modernization leveraging OpenShift, Juju, and S3-compatible storage (Ceph, MinIO, TrueNAS).
• Collaborate with Data, ML, and Platform Engineering teams to align IaaS architecture with emerging workloads—data pipelines, MLflow, and Airflow orchestration.
• Establish GitOps and CI/CD frameworks (ArgoCD, Helm, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps) for consistent infrastructure delivery and configuration management.
• Lead capacity planning, HA/DR strategy, and monitoring/alerting design using Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki stacks.
• Partner with InfoSec to embed zero-trust, OIDC/SAML-based IAM, and secret management best practices into infrastructure lifecycle.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to organization-wide technical enablement through documentation, workshops, and community participation.

 QUALIFICATIONS

• 10+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale infrastructure systems across on-prem and cloud environments.
• Proven expertise in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible) with experience authoring reusable modules and providers.
• Deep understanding of hybrid and private cloud platforms (OpenShift, Juju, MAAS, OpenStack, VMware, Proxmox).
• Strong background in storage (Ceph, TrueNAS, S3, NFS) and networking (VLAN, VXLAN, SDN) for high-availability architectures.
• Demonstrated experience building GitOps-based deployment pipelines and maintaining production-grade Kubernetes environments.
• Familiarity with data and ML infrastructure integration—MLflow, Airflow, Databricks, or Spark preferred.
• Strong proficiency in Python, Go, and Bash for automation and platform tooling.
• Excellent cross-functional leadership, communication, and mentorship skills. 

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE

• Background in HPC, ML infrastructure, or sovereign/regulated environments.
• Familiarity with energy-aware computing, modular data centers, or ESG-driven infrastructure design.
• Experience collaborating with European and global engineering partners.
• Strong communicator who can bridge engineering, business, and vendor ecosystems seamlessly.