Systems Administrator/Platform Engineer

Systems Administrator/Systems Engineer *IT · Platform · Automation* · Mid-level · On-site, Dallas, TX About the role Common Objects builds a multi-tenant computer-vision and video-analytics platform: .NET/C# microservices running on Kubernetes, shipped to our own cloud environments as well as customer-hosted and fully air-gapped on-prem installs. We're a small team hiring a broad, capable generalist to own our systems end to end: the everyday IT that keeps a technical team productive and the platform engineering that keeps our software shipping. This is a wide role on purpose. In a given week you might set up a new hire's laptop and sort out identity and licensing in the morning, stand up a developer's environment after lunch, and spend the afternoon improving the deployment pipeline or tuning the Kubernetes platform. In practice, with a team this size the IT side keeps the lights on but won't fill your week. Once the fundamentals are handled, most of your time goes into the platform: infrastructure, automation, GitOps, and the deployment systems behind our product. For the right person, this is a real path from IT into platform engineering, with the room and the reason to grow that way. You'll work directly alongside our engineering team and report to the CIO. Why this role * *Real ownership.* You own this surface end to end and see your work in production fast. * *A real growth path.* IT is the foundation here, not the ceiling. Because the team is small, you'll have genuine time to go deeper into platform engineering, security, or writing more code, and we'll back the direction you want to grow. What you'll do *General IT* * Run day-to-day IT for the team: accounts, access, licensing, and the everyday "my thing isn't working" support that keeps people unblocked. * Administer identity, productivity, and collaboration platforms (Microsoft 365 / Entra ID). * Provision, manage, patch, and secure employee *workstations* across *Windows and Mac*. * Own onboarding and offboarding end to end: equipment, accounts, and access from someone's first day to their last. * Manage IT assets and hardware procurement, and keep the office essentials humming (network gear, conference/AV, peripherals). *Developer environments & tooling* * Build, maintain, and support the developer environments and tooling the engineering team relies on. * Standardize and automate environment setup so onboarding and rebuilds are fast and repeatable. *Cloud, infrastructure & platform* * Operate our multi-cloud and on-prem infrastructure. * Run and improve our Kubernetes platform: workload deployment plus day-2 operations like upgrades, storage, networking, and certificates. * Own the GitOps workflow and the CI/CD pipelines that build, test, and publish our software. * Package and version releases for customer-hosted and *air-gapped* deployments. *Reliability, security & automation* * Keep things running: monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting across the whole stack; lead incident response and follow up so the same thing doesn't bite twice. * Manage secrets, access, and identity hygiene cleanly, and keep certificate/PKI in good shape. * Document what you build: runbooks and operational notes so knowledge lives in the system, not just in your head. * Automate the toil. If you're doing something twice by hand, you're scripting it the third time. What we're looking for We care more about how you think than which tools you've used. Tools change; the understanding underneath them is what lasts. If you grasp the fundamentals and pick things up quickly, you can learn our specific stack on the job. So this list is about depth of understanding, not a checklist of products. * *3-5 years* of hands-on systems, IT, infrastructure, or DevOps work, enough range that you've watched things break in more than one way and learned from it. * *You understand how systems actually work* underneath the tooling, and you debug from first principles instead of guessing or pattern-matching. * *Networking:* you understand how traffic really moves (DNS, routing, firewalls, TLS) and can reason to the real cause when something "just stopped working." * *Linux:* you're at home in a terminal and know what's happening beneath it: processes, permissions, the filesystem, logs. * *Containers & orchestration:* you understand how containerized workloads get scheduled, networked, and stored, and what's actually wrong when one won't start or won't stay up. (We run Kubernetes, but the concepts matter more than the platform.) * *Delivery:* you understand _why_ version-controlled, automated delivery beats clicking around a console: the principles behind CI/CD and GitOps, not one specific pipeline. * *Identity & access:* you understand how authentication, directories, and device management fit together to keep people productive and accounts secure. * *An automation instinct:* your reflex is to codify and script repetitive work rather than repeat it by hand. * *You learn fast and own outcomes.* You take responsibility for what you run, communicate clearly, and keep a small team in the loop. _No specific degree or certification required. Show us how you think._ Bonus: hands-on with our stack None of these are required. We're hiring for understanding, and the specific tools are learnable. But if you've worked with any of them, say so; it's a head start: * *Containers, orchestration & GitOps:* Kubernetes (we run RKE2/Rancher, with Longhorn and MetalLB on-prem), Helm, ArgoCD, Docker * *CI/CD & automation:* GitHub Actions (path-filtered matrix builds and semantic-versioned release pipelines), self-hosted runners on Kubernetes, container registries (Docker Hub, AWS ECR), Terraform * *Cloud:* AWS and Azure, including Azure Government / FedRAMP-aligned environments * *Identity & endpoints:* Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Intune; Windows and Mac management * *Data, messaging & storage:* PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis; RabbitMQ, Kafka, and MQTT; S3-compatible object storage (AWS S3, MinIO on-prem) * *Observability & secrets:* OpenTelemetry, Zabbix; secrets management (e.g. 1Password) * *App & dev stack (context, not a requirement):* .NET/C#, Python, and React/TypeScript. The product is computer-vision/ML, so any exposure to PyTorch or model serving (e.g. Triton) is a fun plus. * *Customer & edge deployments:* packaging and running software for customer-hosted, on-prem, and air-gapped sites (Docker Compose, RTSP/video pipelines) Pay: $80,000.00 - $110,000.00 per year Benefits: * Dental insurance * Health insurance * Health savings account * Life insurance * Paid time off * Vision insurance Work Location: In person