[Hiring] Systems Engineer @OpenTeams

Role Description

We're looking for a Systems Engineer to join our platform support team. This is a role for someone early in their infrastructure career who wants real ownership of production systems and is willing to earn it by being the person others can count on.

The work runs across two streams:

• Internal Platforms: Covers the systems OpenTeams itself runs on — identity, cloud, internal applications, our website.
• Project Support: Backing up our infrastructure engineers on the platforms we build and operate for customers, including government programs.

Both streams start at the front line. That's the entry point, not the destination - as you build real context, the scope grows toward environment builds, deployment configuration, and eventually owning pieces of a platform outright.

This is a fully remote, U.S.-based role working with a distributed team that relies heavily on asynchronous communication.

Key Responsibilities

• Internal Platforms:
  • Own the internal request queue: triage what comes in, resolve what you can, pull in help when you can't, and make sure nothing silently falls through.
  • Administer Google Workspace and identity systems — accounts, groups, SSO integrations, security policy, and the onboarding and offboarding runbooks that keep access correct as people join and leave.
  • Support the provisioning and maintenance of cloud infrastructure (AWS or equivalent): accounts, IAM roles, networking basics, resource tagging, and cost visibility.
  • Deploy and operate internal applications on Kubernetes using Helm and ArgoCD, under the guidance of senior engineers.
  • Maintain the internal OpenTeams website - an Astro site backed by EmDash - including build pipelines, deploys, DNS, and content publishing support for the teams that use it.
  • Build and maintain monitoring and alerting for the systems you own, and help reduce alert noise rather than adding to it.
  • Handle security and access hygiene: patching, MFA enforcement, periodic access reviews, endpoint configuration, and offboarding.
• Project Support:
  • Handle incoming issues from customer teams: reproduce the problem, gather logs and context, resolve what's covered by existing procedure, and hand off cleanly when it isn't.
  • Execute established deployment and maintenance runbooks against customer environments, and flag the steps that are unclear, brittle, or missing.
  • Track issues through to closure and keep customer-facing status accurate, so nothing sits in an unknown state.
  • Assist with hardening and compliance work - applying hardened configurations, gathering evidence for control implementation, and keeping infrastructure documentation current.
  • Grow into environment builds, configuration changes, and platform ownership as your context deepens.
  • Carry what you learn back the other direction: patterns that work on customer platforms belong in our internal systems, and vice versa.
• Across Both:
  • Participate in incident response, and contribute to postmortems focused on the system rather than the person.
  • Collaborate with a fully remote, distributed team using asynchronous communication.

Qualifications

• 1–3 years of combined experience in IT support, systems administration, or infrastructure work.
• Comfortable in Linux and on the command line: filesystems, permissions, processes, logs, systemd, package management, SSH.
• Working understanding of networking fundamentals — DNS, DHCP, HTTP/TLS, VPNs, firewalls.
• Scripting ability in Python and/or Bash.
• Comfortable with Git and pull request workflows.
• Some hands-on exposure to at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and to containers.
• Experience administering SaaS tools (Google Workspace, Slack, or similar).
• Strong communication skills.
• Genuine service orientation.
• Willingness to say "I don't know yet, here's how I'm going to find out."
• U.S. citizenship and eligibility to obtain and maintain a security clearance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Working knowledge of SQL and relational databases.
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience.
• Exposure to GitOps tooling or CI/CD pipelines.
• Any infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Familiarity with identity and SSO standards.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools.
• Frontend or static site experience, particularly Astro.
• Familiarity with the Python data science ecosystem or JupyterHub.
• Security+ or a comparable certification.
• Any exposure to regulated or government environments.
• Open source contribution of any size.

Benefits

• 100% employer paid medical premiums for employees.
• Self-managed PTO with a minimum time off requirement.
• Opportunities to collaborate with global experts.
• Investment in curiosity, creativity, and ownership.

Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

OpenTeams understands that valuing diverse creative practices and forms of knowledge is crucial to and enriches the company’s core mission. We encourage applications from everyone, including members of all equity-seeking communities.

We are an equal opportunity employer - all qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for recruitment, interviews, employment, training, compensation, promotion, and related activities.