Systems Engineer

Location: U.S - Remote

Work Authorization: U.S. citizenship required

Clearance: An active clearance is not required at the time of hire. Candidates must be able to obtain and maintain a Secret security clearance, which includes a federal background investigation. 

Salary Range: $85,000 - $120,000 USD, dependent on experience level and location

We're looking for a Systems Engineer to join our platform support team. This is a role for someone early in their infrastructure career who wants real ownership of production systems and is willing to earn it by being the person others can count on.

The work runs across two streams. Internal Platforms covers the systems OpenTeams itself runs on — identity, cloud, internal applications, our website. You own that surface end to end, which means you're the first responder when something breaks and the one who fixes the underlying cause so it stops happening. Project Support means backing up our infrastructure engineers on the platforms we build and operate for customers, including government programs.

Both streams start at the front line. That's the entry point, not the destination - as you build real context, the scope grows toward environment builds, deployment configuration, and eventually owning pieces of a platform outright.

The two sides reinforce each other. Our internal systems run on the same open-source building blocks we ship to customers, so operating our own environments is how you become useful on a customer deployment. You will not be an expert in all of it on day one, and we don't expect you to be. We expect you to be curious, to write things down, and to ask before you break something.

This is a fully remote, U.S.-based role working with a distributed team that relies heavily on asynchronous communication.

• Own the internal request queue: triage what comes in, resolve what you can, pull in help when you can't, and make sure nothing silently falls through.
• Administer Google Workspace and identity systems — accounts, groups, SSO integrations, security policy, and the onboarding and offboarding runbooks that keep access correct as people join and leave.
• Support the provisioning and maintenance of cloud infrastructure (AWS or equivalent): accounts, IAM roles, networking basics, resource tagging, and cost visibility.
• Deploy and operate internal applications on Kubernetes using Helm and ArgoCD, under the guidance of senior engineers. Understand what you're deploying, not just the command that deploys it.
• Maintain the internal OpenTeams website - an Astro site backed by EmDash - including build pipelines, deploys, DNS, and content publishing support for the teams that use it.
• Build and maintain monitoring and alerting for the systems you own, and help reduce alert noise rather than adding to it.
• Handle security and access hygiene: patching, MFA enforcement, periodic access reviews, endpoint configuration, and offboarding.

• Handle incoming issues from customer teams: reproduce the problem, gather logs and context, resolve what's covered by existing procedure, and hand off cleanly when it isn't.
• Execute established deployment and maintenance runbooks against customer environments, and flag the steps that are unclear, brittle, or missing.
• Track issues through to closure and keep customer-facing status accurate, so nothing sits in an unknown state.
• Assist with hardening and compliance work - applying hardened configurations, gathering evidence for control implementation, and keeping infrastructure documentation current.
• Grow into environment builds, configuration changes, and platform ownership as your context deepens.
• Carry what you learn back the other direction: patterns that work on customer platforms belong in our internal systems, and vice versa.

• Participate in incident response, and contribute to postmortems focused on the system rather than the person.
• Collaborate with a fully remote, distributed team using asynchronous communication.

• 1–3 years of combined experience in IT support, systems administration, or infrastructure work.
• Comfortable in Linux and on the command line: filesystems, permissions, processes, logs, systemd, package management, SSH.
• Working understanding of networking fundamentals — DNS, DHCP, HTTP/TLS, VPNs, firewalls — enough to reason about why something can't reach something else.
• Scripting ability in Python and/or Bash, sufficient to automate a repetitive task rather than doing it forty times.
• Comfortable with Git and pull request workflows.
• Some hands-on exposure to at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and to containers.
• Experience administering SaaS tools (Google Workspace, Slack, or similar) including user lifecycle and permissions.
• Strong communication skills. Most of this job happens in tickets, pull requests, and documentation, and clarity in writing is a technical skill here.
• Genuine service orientation. The people filing support requests are your teammates, and how they're treated when something is broken matters.
• Willingness to say "I don't know yet, here's how I'm going to find out."
• U.S. citizenship and eligibility to obtain and maintain a security clearance. 

• Working knowledge of SQL and relational databases — able to write queries independently to pull data and build dashboards
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience — kubectl, Helm, reading logs and events to figure out why a pod won't start.
• Exposure to GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux) or CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar).
• Any infrastructure-as-code experience: OpenTofu, Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible.
• Familiarity with identity and SSO standards — Keycloak, OIDC, SAML.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Frontend or static site experience, particularly Astro, or work with a headless CMS.
• Familiarity with the Python data science ecosystem or JupyterHub.
• Security+ or a comparable certification, or coursework in security fundamentals.
• Any exposure to regulated or government environments — RMF, NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, or restricted-network deployment.
• Open source contribution of any size. We build in the open where we can, and it shows in how we work.