Sr. Systems Engineer

Job Description Senior System Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA | San Jose, CA | Los Angeles, CA | San Diego, CA | Sacramento, CA | Seattle, WA | Portland, OR | (West Coast Preferred)

Reporting to the Manager, IT System Operations, the (Senior) System Engineer is responsible for maintaining, monitoring, and optimizing Digital Realty's global systems infrastructure to ensure availability, performance, compliance, and security. This role supports both on-premises and cloud-based environments, drives operational excellence through automation and tooling, and partners with teams across the business to deliver reliable and scalable technology solutions. At the senior level, the position also provides technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to engineers within the region while supporting critical infrastructure initiatives across the enterprise.

• Maintain and support global IT systems infrastructure to ensure high availability, reliability, and performance.
• Deploy, manage, and optimize Microsoft Windows, VMware, Azure, AWS, and hybrid infrastructure environments.
• Manage infrastructure lifecycle activities, including operating system upgrades, patching, hardware refreshes, and technology modernization initiatives.
• Maintain backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity solutions to ensure data integrity and recoverability.
• Monitor infrastructure health and proactively identify, troubleshoot, and resolve performance, capacity, and operational issues.
• Ensure compliance with IT policies and security standards, including patching, anti-virus controls, vulnerability remediation, operating system updates, and system hardening.
• Conduct vulnerability assessments and remediate findings within established service level agreements (SLAs).
• Evaluate, implement, and maintain infrastructure management, automation, monitoring, and reporting tools to improve operational efficiency.
• Provide systems engineering expertise for business initiatives, audits, infrastructure projects, architecture reviews, and technical assessments.
• Participate in an after-hours on-call rotation and provide support for critical incidents and operational needs.

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related field; or equivalent combination of education and 5+ years of relevant experience.
• Strong experience administering Microsoft technologies, including Windows Server, Azure, Active Directory, and enterprise systems management.
• Strong knowledge of VMware infrastructure and virtualized environments.
• Experience supporting cloud platforms, including Azure and AWS.
• Experience supporting storage technologies, including SAN infrastructure.
• Understanding of infrastructure security, vulnerability management, patch management, compliance frameworks, and risk management practices.
• Microsoft certification required; VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certification preferred.
• Experience working in complex international and multi-vendor environments.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and stakeholder management skills.
• Strong analytical, organizational, problem-solving, and critical-thinking abilities with a proactive and quality-focused approach.

Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions. Platform DIGITAL®, the company's global data center platform, provides customers with a secure data meeting place and a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx®) solution methodology for powering innovation and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges. Digital Realty gives its customers access to the connected data communities that matter to them with a global data center footprint of 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 25+ countries on six continents.

To learn more about Digital Realty, please visit  or follow us on Linked In and Twitter.

Our IT team is at the heart of our business. We develop infrastructures, design and build networks, support servers and provide the first line of support by delivering rich connectivity for our customers. With new data centers…