Senior Systems Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Systems Engineer based in Canada. This role offers the opportunity to engineer and operate large-scale global infrastructure supporting billions of page views and a vast international user base. You will work across availability, performance, security, automation, and reliability within a vertically integrated systems environment. The position combines deep technical ownership with hands-on problem solving across web infrastructure and lower-level systems. You will help optimize critical services, respond to failures, strengthen security, and remove operational friction for software development teams. Working within a small, highly skilled team, you will have visibility across a broad infrastructure stack and significant autonomy in solving complex problems. The role also offers opportunities to collaborate with distributed teammates and contribute to infrastructure practices at global scale. Accountabilities: - Maximize service availability and uptime through proactive capacity planning, sound architectural decisions, automation, monitoring, and rapid incident response. - Design, build, operate, and maintain large-scale web infrastructure with a strong focus on reliability and operational excellence. - Manage and optimize Nginx environments, including advanced routing configurations, load balancing, performance, and high availability. - Operate and maintain large MySQL and MariaDB deployments while protecting performance, uptime, and data integrity. - Run, troubleshoot, and optimize PHP applications operating at significant scale. - Investigate and improve interactions between application services and lower-level systems, including filesystems, networking, memory management, and kernel behavior. - Optimize server-side and client-side performance to improve the experience of users across global services.

- Work with third-party services and infrastructure components when required to improve reliability, performance, and service delivery. - Maintain strong security practices through proactive monitoring, enforcement, real-time incident response, and robust data integrity and backup strategies. - Develop disaster recovery capabilities and ensure systems can be restored effectively when critical failures occur. - Remove operational friction for developers by providing infrastructure expertise, rapid technical guidance, and effective solutions to hosting and deployment challenges. - Independently architect, prototype, implement, and maintain solutions for complex infrastructure and hosting requirements. - Collaborate with distributed engineering teams and participate in periodic in-person team gatherings, including approximately 2–3 weeks of travel per year. Requirements: - Significant professional experience managing large-scale, public-facing web infrastructure and complex hosting environments. - Deep hands-on experience with Nginx, including advanced routing, load balancing, high availability, and performance optimization. - Strong experience operating large MySQL or MariaDB deployments with a focus on reliability, performance, and data integrity. - Proven experience running and debugging PHP applications at scale. - Strong understanding of lower-level systems and their relationship to web services, including filesystems, networking, memory management, and kernel internals. - Experience with complex public-facing infrastructure where availability, performance, security, and operational resilience are critical. - Ability to independently design, prototype, troubleshoot, and maintain infrastructure solutions with limited supervision. - Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, with the ability to investigate complex technical issues and identify practical solutions. - Exceptional attention to detail and a strong commitment to operational excellence.