Senior Systems Engineer

Overview

Rate is a leading retail mortgage lender delivering a seamless, tech‑driven experience to help customers reach their home ownership and financial goals. Founded in 2000 and based in Chicago, Rate operates in all 50 states and D.C., supporting over 2million homeowners through diverse loan products and a fully digital experience.

We are looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to own enterprise infrastructure and platform services across on‑premises and cloud environments. The role involves designing, automating, securing, and operating highly available systems; leading complex troubleshooting; and turning recurring operational work into reliable, automated solutions.

• Infrastructure Engineering and Architecture – design, implement and support resilient enterprise infrastructure across Windows Server, Active Directory, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, PKI, virtualization, compute, storage, and related platform services; engineer and operate Microsoft
  365 and hybrid identity and messaging services; lead technical discovery, solution design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operational handoff; develop standards, reference architectures, lifecycle plans, capacity forecasts, and technical‑debt roadmaps.
• Automation and Platform Improvement – develop production‑quality automation primarily with Power Shell (and Python, shell scripting as appropriate); apply infrastructure‑as‑code and configuration‑management principles; build validation, logging, audit trails, error handling, retry logic, safe failure behavior, and rollback paths into automation and operational tooling; identify repetitive work and create measurable improvements.
• Reliability, Security, and Operations – monitor service health, performance, capacity, configuration drift, and security posture; lead incident response; partner with Security and Compliance teams to implement least privileged access controls, secure configuration baselines, vulnerability remediation, patching, logging, encryption; design, maintain, and test backup, restore, disaster recovery, and business continuity capabilities; execute upgrades, migrations, patching, lifecycle refreshes through disciplined change management.
• Service Ownership and Collaboration – maintain accurate architecture diagrams, standards, configuration records, knowledge articles, operational procedures; create Service Now and Jira records; serve as senior escalation point and mentor other engineers; work effectively with distributed teams, vendors, managed service providers, and business stakeholders; recommend platform consolidation, retirement, modernization, or optimization.

• 5+ years of progressive, hands‑on systems engineering or infrastructure administration experience in a medium‑to‑large enterprise.
• Strong experience administering Windows Server, Active Directory, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, and enterprise authentication and authorization services.
• Hands‑on experience with Microsoft
  365, Microsoft
  
  EntraID, and Exchange Online or Exchange Hybrid administration.
• Experience with at least one public cloud platform (Azure preferred; AWS also valued) including hybrid‑cloud connectivity and operations.
• Strong Power Shell skills, including reusable functions, structured error handling, logging, and secure credential handling.
• Experience with VMware vSphere, Hyper‑V, or comparable virtualization platforms and server, storage, backup, and recovery technologies.
• Working knowledge of TCP/IP, routing fundamentals, firewalls, load balancers, certificates, proxies, and other infrastructure dependencies.
• Knowledge of enterprise security practices (least privilege, patch and vulnerability management, secure baselines, audit logging, change control).
• Proven ability to diagnose complex incidents, coordinate recovery, document root causes and deliver corrective actions.
• Clear written and verbal communication, strong operational judgment, and ability to manage multiple priorities.

• Infrastructure‑as‑code or configuration‑management experience with Terraform, Bicep/ARM, Ansible, Power Shell Desired State Configuration, or similar.
• Experienc…