Senior Systems Engineer, IT Operations and Infrastructure at Firestorm in San Diego, CA

Job description

Who We Are At Firestorm, we are building the future of expeditionary defense manufacturing and autonomous systems. Modern conflict has exposed a fundamental problem: the systems needed most by operators are often too expensive, too slow to produce, and too difficult to sustain at scale. Firestorm exists to change that. We develop mission-adaptable aerial systems and deployable manufacturing infrastructure designed to put capability directly into the hands of the warfighter. From modular unmanned aircraft to xCell — our deployable microfactory — our goal is to make defense systems rapidly deployable, adaptable, and producible at the point of need. We are looking for builders, operators, and problem-solvers who want to work on meaningful technology with real-world impact. About the Role Firestorm builds uncrewed aircraft and the manufacturing network that produces them: full-capability plants, deployable xCell edge factories, and forward-deployed sites that stand up production near the point of need. Crucible is the software that runs that network. It runs in the cloud, inside a factory, and air-gapped in classified environments. At the edge, Crucible has to operate reliably on local compute, connect to factory equipment, and keep working when cloud infrastructure and internet connectivity are unavailable. We are hiring a Systems Engineer to support critical business operations, infrastructure in the cloud and on-premise, Microsoft 365 GCC-High, Amazon-Gov and other systems. What You’ll Do Infrastructure Provisioning & Maintenance: Deploy, configure, patch, and manage physical servers, virtual machines, cloud instances (AWS, Azure, GCP), and enterprise storage. System Monitoring & Health Checks: Implement and maintain observability tooling (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch) to track system performance, resource utilization, and uptime. Incident Response & Triage: Serve as an escalation point for system outages and critical alerts; lead root-cause analysis (RCA) and document post-mortems to prevent recurrence. Automation & Scripting: Write and maintain scripts (Bash, Python, PowerShell) and infrastructure-as-code configurations (Terraform, Ansible) to automate routine operational tasks and deployments. Network & Connectivity Management: Monitor core network services (DNS, DHCP, VPNs, routing, and firewalls) to maintain secure, low-latency communication across environments. Backup & Disaster Recovery: Design, schedule, test, and verify automated backups, data replication, and disaster recovery plans to ensure strict Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives (RPO/RTO). Security & Compliance: Apply system hardening standards, manage access control (IAM/Active Directory/SSO), audit system logs, and remediate CVE vulnerabilities in coordination with the security team. Capacity Planning & Performance Tuning: Analyze compute, storage, and network trends to optimize system performance and forecast hardware or cloud resource scaling needs. Documentation & Standard Operating Procedures: Author and update runbooks, system architecture diagrams, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and operational workflows for team use. Required Qualifications U.S. Citizenship and ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance Operating Systems: Deep operational proficiency with Linux distributions (RHEL, Ubuntu, Rocky) and/or Windows Server environments, including OS hardening, kernel tuning, and troubleshooting. Scripting & Automation: Strong practical scripting skills in at least one language (Bash, Python, or PowerShell) to automate administrative tasks and repetitive workflows. Networking Fundamentals: Solid understanding of core networking protocols and services (TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, HTTP/S, SSH, VPNs, and firewall rules). Virtualization & Cloud: Hands-on experience administering virtualized infrastructure (VMware ESXi/vCenter, Hyper-V, KVM) or public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP). Monitoring & Tooling