Senior IT Systems Engineer - Seattle, WA

Job Description
ATTENTION MILITARY AFFILIATED JOB SEEKERS - Our organization works with partner companies to source qualified talent for their open roles. The following position is available to Veterans, Transitioning Military, National Guard and Reserve Members, Military Spouses, Wounded Warriors, and their Caregivers. If you have the required skill set, education requirements, and experience, please click the submit button and follow the next steps. All positions are onsite, unless otherwise stated.
ExtraHop is reinventing Network Detection and Response (NDR) to help enterprises and organizations stay ahead of emerging threats with unmatched network visibility, context, and control.
Today's attackers bypass traditional security defenses through identity-based entry, move invisibly across cloud, on-premise, and data center networks using encryption and trusted applications, and exploit and exit whenever they want. But all of that movement is visible on the network... if you can see it.
By combining the power of NDR with Network Performance Management (NPM), Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), and forensics in a single, integrated platform, ExtraHop can decrypt and unlock complete packet-level data at wire speed, analyze and correlate it across all your networks, applications, devices, and users with cloud-scale machine learning, and provide a single interface to the SOC to detect, investigate, and remediate modern cyber risks in real time.
Position Summary:
We're looking for a Senior IT Systems Engineer who thrives on designing scalable infrastructure, solving operational challenges, and enabling team success. This role plays a critical part in building and supporting ExtraHop's hybrid and cloud-native environments. As part of the ExtraHop IT team, you'll own and enhance core systems and services that power internal operations and support end-user needs across the organization.
You'll apply both strategic thinking and hands-on expertise to system design, incident response, automation, and platform optimization. In this role, you'll help set the standards for reliability, security, and operational efficiency while mentoring peers and contributing to a culture of learning and collaboration.
Key Responsibilities:

• System Engineering & Reliability: Ensure availability and performance of critical infrastructure and services through well-designed systems, active monitoring and response, and participation in an on-call rotation.
• Architecture & Design: Design and implement resilient, scalable hybrid/multi-cloud solutions, with a focus on automation, security, and long-term maintainability.
• Automation & Scripting: Develop and maintain automation tools and scripts to streamline system operations and reduce manual overhead-primarily using Shell and Python.
• Stakeholder & Executive Management: Serve as a technical touch point for stakeholders and executives as needed, maintaining the right level of depth for the given conversation to bring them along.
• Documentation & Knowledge Sharing: Create and maintain technical documentation, design diagrams, and runbooks. Support knowledge transfer and cross-training within the team.
• Security & Compliance: Apply a security-first mindset to system administration tasks. Assist in enforcing access controls, auditing, and patching.
• Mentorship & Collaboration: Support junior engineers through coaching and peer review. Act as a technical resource to cross-functional partners and contribute to architectural discussions.

Additional Qualifications/Responsibilities
Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in Linux, Unix, and/or Windows systems engineering or administration.
• Strong scripting skills with Shell (Bash) and Python; experience automating routine tasks.
• Proven experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and hybrid infrastructures.
• Familiarity with monitoring tools and logging frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• Solid understanding of networking and application protocols: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, SSH, TLS.
• Experience with virtualization and containerization technologies (e.g., KVM, Docker).
• Experience with configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, or Chef).
• Comfort with distributed version control (e.g. Git) and collaborative workflows.
• Strong problem-solving, troubleshooting, and decision-making skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD tools.
• Knowledge of secondary protocols (UDP, SNMP, SMTP, NTP).
• Experience with firewalls, VPNs, and security appliance configuration.
• Familiarity with ExtraHop products or similar observability tools.
• Contribution to internal tools or in-house IT automation systems.

Salary:

• The base salary range for this position is 130,000 - 160,000 + bonus + benefits