Hybrid Principal Systems Engineer – IaaS, Hardware

at Mara

• Job title: Principal Systems Engineer – IaaS, Hardware
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Airflow, Ansible, Azure, Cloud, Grafana, Kubernetes, NFS, OpenShift, OpenStack, Prometheus, Python, Spark, Terraform, VMware, Go
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Dallas, United States

About the role

• Principal IaaS Engineer leading architecture, standardization of AI infrastructure. Collaborating with data and security teams to enhance global infrastructure platforms.

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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Retirement plans
• Paid time off
• Flexible work arrangements
• Professional development