Principal Systems Engineer

Principal Systems Engineer The Principal Systems Engineer provides senior technical leadership for the architecture, deployment, and reliable operation of Boingo’s global production, staging, QA, beta, and development environments. This role combines hands-on datacenter infrastructure experience with deep private cloud, virtualization, automation, and cloud-native platform expertise. In this role, you will design, optimize, and support HPE Private Cloud Business Edition (PCBE) environments; manage HPE VME and VMware virtualization platforms; support high-performance HPE compute and storage solutions, including HPE SimpliVity and Nimble architectures; and help build reliable, automated platforms running on Ubuntu and Kubernetes. Responsibilities Architectural Leadership: Define the long-term technical vision and design enterprise-grade, high-availability solutions across all environment tiers. Actively identify single points of failure, technical debt, and cross-domain performance bottlenecks across the HPE PCBE , SimpliVity, and Nimble fabrics. End-to-End Infrastructure Lifecycle: Oversee physical layer bare-metal deployments (racking, stacking, cabling) and completely automate the provisioning and post-provisioning lifecycles using cloud-init, HPE iLO/Redfish APIs, and IaC frameworks. Private Cloud Engineering at Scale: Build, scale, optimize, and maintain highly resilient Kubernetes, HPE VME , and VMware platforms managed via HPE PCBE to support demanding, high-throughput software products. TOIL Elimination: Drive scripting, self-service infrastructure, and test automation to ensure backwards compatibility of features while radically reducing administrative overhead and operational TOIL. Governance & Standards: Define, document, and strictly enforce company-wide standards and best practices for systems design, testing, and implementation. Justify and execute improvements using strict change control methodologies. Cross-Functional Orchestration: Lead sprint execution within the Atlassian suite ; partner intimately with Network, Development, and QA business units to design creative, proactive solutions to complex operational issues. Team Upskilling & Mentorship: Foster a collaborative environment of deep engineering cross-training, upskilling the existing team in Kubernetes, HPE private cloud architectures, and SRE disciplines. Mission-Critical Availability: Coordinate on-call escalation procedures and provide high-tier 24x7 support for production outages when emergency remediation is required. Qualifications Experience: 8+ years of progressive experience in systems engineering, DevOps, site reliability engineering, or a related infrastructure engineering role. Leadership: Experience leading complex infrastructure initiatives, setting technical direction, and mentoring engineers. Operating Systems: Advanced Linux administration experience with Ubuntu and RHEL 7+, including kernel configuration, cgroups, kernel modules, PKI, iptables, and network interfaces. Datacenter Infrastructure: Hands-on experience with physical datacenter lifecycle work, including racking, stacking, structured cabling, power and cooling considerations, and bare-metal provisioning. HPE & Virtualization Architecture: Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining hyperconverged and storage-centric platforms using HPE Private Cloud Business Edition (PCBE), VMware, and HPE VME environments. Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related STEM discipline; or equivalent professional systems engineering experience. Preferred Technical Expertise & Tooling HPE Ecosystem: Strong experience with HPE PCBE, HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged systems, HPE Nimble Storage arrays, HPE GreenLake, HPE OneView, and iLO RESTful APIs. Kubernetes Orchestration: Experience installing, configuring, troubleshooting, and scaling production Kubernetes and RKE clusters from the bare-metal layer up. Cloud-Native Internals: Familiarity with CNI (Ci…