Senior Systems Operations Engineer

Dice is the leading career destination for tech experts at every stage of their careers. Our client, Strategic Staffing Solutions, is seeking the following. Apply via Dice today!Job Title: Senior Systems Operations EngineerLocation: Charlotte, NC, Irving, TX, Chandler, AZDuration: 18 monthsPay Rate: $73.50Job/Role Description:This role supports application and middleware production operations with a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) mindset, shifting from reactive operations to proactive reliability engineering across VM-based and container-adjacent environments, including OpenShift (OCP).Provides senior-level application and middleware support for complex, high-availability services and acts as an escalation point for L2/L3 incidents, leading disciplined troubleshooting, recovery, and stabilization.Embeds SRE practices into day-to-day operations by defining reliability signals, improving alert quality, driving blameless post-incident learning, and prioritizing systemic fixes and toil reduction.Implements and continuously improves observability across applications and middleware, including logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and actionable alerting to enhance detection, diagnosis, and mean time to resolution (MTTR).Designs, develops, and maintains infrastructure-as-code and configuration-as-code capabilities supporting VM-based and container-adjacent workloads, including OpenShift (OCP) enablement.Builds and supports automation for operational actions across middleware components, such as standardized status checks, start/stop/restart patterns, to enable safer self-service and reduce dependency bottlenecks.Designs and implements intelligent automation for platform and middleware operations, including integrating AI/agent-based approaches into workflows with appropriate guardrails for triage assistance, predictive signals, and automated remediation.Monitors configuration drift, supports automated compliance checks, and implements remediation patterns aligned to enterprise change management, security, and risk controls.Integrates infrastructure and operational automation with CI/CD pipelines to enable repeatable, auditable deployments and safer rollouts.Supports core platform components that enable applications and container platforms, including ingress patterns, load balancing integration, and shared supporting services.Develops and maintains runbooks, operational documentation, and validation/testing approaches for automation and platform procedures to ensure operational readiness and consistent execution.Participates in on-call rotations and provides operational support coverage as required, with flexibility to work in a 24/7 environment including weekends and holidays.Delivers assigned operational engineering and automation outcomes with a strong focus on stability, resiliency, and measurable toil reduction.Follows enterprise change management, risk, and compliance processes while continuously improving platform reliability and automation maturity through standardization, documentation, and repeatable delivery.Supports a large portfolio of mission-critical applications and platforms, contributing to capacity building and workload management in a dynamic environment.Required Qualifications4+ years of Systems Engineering or Technology Infrastructure/Operations Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through work experience, training, military experience, or education4+ years of application and/or middleware production support in complex, high-availability environments, including incident response and problem management with strong root cause discipline4+ years of hands-on automation and configuration management experience (Ansible preferred or similar), plus strong scripting skills (Python, Bash, PowerShell, or similar)4+ years of Linux administration (RHEL preferred) and/or Windows Server administration supporting enterprise production workloads4+ years of Git-based version control practices, including pull requests and peer review, with a focus on repeatability and code qualityWorking experience with infrastructure-as-code concepts, including modular design and environment consistencyExperience supporting hybrid/private cloud platforms and container-adjacent hosting models; familiarity with OpenShift (OCP) or Kubernetes-base