Senior Systems Engineer

Who we need  We are hiring a  Senior Systems Engineer  to join our Infrastructure & Operations team. This is a senior, hands‑on infrastructure role focused on Linux systems, virtualization, physical and co‑location infrastructure, Kubernetes, storage, automation, and complex production troubleshooting. The successful candidate will act as a senior technical escalation point for systems and infrastructure issues and will work closely with Dev Ops, Network, DBA, Security, and application teams to deliver reliable, secure, scalable infrastructure in support of illumin's global operations.
The ideal candidate has deep expertise in core systems and infrastructure engineering, broad knowledge across adjacent technology domains, and the ability to trace problems across operating systems, compute, storage, networking, virtualization, and container platforms. The role requires strong ownership, sound operational judgment, and a focus on automation and continuous improvement.
This is a full-time, hybrid position, working in our Toronto office three days per week.
You must be able to travel internationally (US & Europe) without restrictions.
How you will make an impact:  Systems Administration & Infrastructure Engineering   Serve as a senior technical escalation point for Linux systems and infrastructure issues, with strong working knowledge of Windows Server environments.
Manage, maintain, and optimize VMware vSphere/ESXi environments and other virtualization platforms, including compute, networking, storage, host lifecycle, and vCenter integration.
Operate and support on-premise, co‑location, and hybrid infrastructure across multiple sites and regions.
Deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot enterprise server hardware, including storage controllers, NICs, firmware, out‑of‑band management, and hardware lifecycle management.
Perform capacity planning, lifecycle management, performance analysis, and reliability improvements across infrastructure platforms.
Cloud‑Native & Container Platforms   Deploy, operate, upgrade, and troubleshoot production Kubernetes clusters port Kubernetes node lifecycle, container runtimes, networking, DNS, certificates, persistent storage, observability, and cluster reliability.
Work with Containerd, Docker, Helm, and related container and orchestration tooling.
Partner with Dev Ops and application teams to improve platform reliability, deployment practices, and operational standards.
Networking & Cross‑Platform Troubleshooting   Apply strong enterprise networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, routing, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, load balancing, and BGP, to troubleshoot infrastructure and application connectivity issues.
Work collaboratively with the Network Engineering team on Cisco, Juniper, load balancers, routing, and datacenter connectivity; direct ownership of all network platforms is not required.
Diagnose complex production issues that span systems, network, storage, virtualization, and application layers using packet captures, logs, metrics, and system‑level tooling.
Automation, Dev Ops & Observability   Develop and maintain infrastructure automation using Python, Ansible, Bash, APIs, and related tooling;
Go experience is an asset.
Automate repetitive infrastructure operations, configuration changes, validation, and systems integrations across large‑scale environments.
Apply Dev Ops practices to configuration management, CI/CD workflows, infrastructure delivery, and operational automation.
Improve monitoring, logging, alerting, capacity management, and observability across infrastructure platforms using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Netdata, ELK, or equivalent.
Storage & Data Platform Infrastructure   Support enterprise and distributed storage technologies, including local storage,…