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 Brazil.

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.
  • Ability to work effectively as part of a small, highly integrated engineering team while taking ownership of individual technical areas.
  • Strong communication and collaboration skills within a distributed, asynchronous environment.
  • Willingness to travel approximately 2--3 weeks per year for in-person collaboration with teammates.
  • Benefits:
    • Salary range of 120,000--180,000+ USD annually.
    • Global salary structure, with compensation paid in local currency.
    • Potential for compensation beyond the stated range based on the contribution and impact expected from the successful candidate.
    • Straightforward, competitive base salary without complex variable compensation.
    • Fully remote work environment.
    • Open vacation policy with no fixed number of vacation days per year.
    • Country-specific benefits and programs based on local eligibility.
    • Opportunity to work on infrastructure supporting extremely large-scale global web traffic.
    • Periodic opportunities for in-person collaboration and international travel.
    • Exposure to complex systems engineering challenges across infrastructure, performance, reliability, and security.