Staff Systems Engineer - Infrastructure Automation & Virtualization

At Cadence, we hire and develop leaders and innovators who want to make an impact on the world of technology. IT Staff Systems Engineer - Infrastructure Automation & Virtualization About The Role We are looking for a Staff engineer to join our Infrastructure team with a primary focus on infrastructure automation and development. In this role, you will design, build, and maintain automation frameworks using Terraform, Ansible, and Python that drive the provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management of our on-premises and hybrid cloud environments. You will also bring strong hands-on experience with virtualization platforms — including Nutanix, KVM, and VMware — to support and evolve our HCI infrastructure. You operate as a skilled individual contributor, executing within established engineering standards, collaborating with senior engineers on architecture decisions, and helping level up junior teammates through mentorship and code review. Key Responsibilities Design and maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) solutions using Terraform and Ansible to automate provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management of compute, storage, and networking resources Write and maintain Python and Bash automation scripts to reduce manual operational overhead, integrate tooling, and support CI/CD pipelines Build and manage CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions or equivalent tooling to automate infrastructure deployments, enforce policy-as-code, and streamline testing and validation workflows Administer and optimize virtualization platforms including Nutanix (AHV, Prism, AOS), KVM, and VMware vSphere/ESXi, ensuring performance, availability, and capacity targets are met Support hybrid cloud operations across AWS and/or Azure, integrating on-premises infrastructure with cloud services using automation-first practices Contribute to infrastructure design discussions, providing input on architecture decisions related to automation, virtualization, HCI, and cloud integration Monitor infrastructure health using observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog), respond to incidents, and drive root-cause analysis and remediation Develop and maintain documentation for automation frameworks, runbooks, and infrastructure standards to ensure operational consistency and knowledge sharing Participate in security and compliance reviews, applying hardening practices and policy-as-code across infrastructure pipelines Mentor junior engineers through pair programming, code review, and knowledge transfer, contributing to team growth and a culture of automation-first thinking Required Qualifications 5–8 years of experience in infrastructure engineering with a strong emphasis on automation and infrastructure-as-code Expert-level proficiency in Terraform — writing modular, reusable HCL configurations for multi-environment deployments Solid hands-on experience with Ansible for configuration management, idempotent playbook development, and role-based automation Proficiency in Python for automation scripting, tooling development, and API integration; Bash scripting for operational tasks Production-level experience with at least two of the following virtualization platforms: Nutanix (AHV/Prism/AOS), KVM/QEMU, VMware vSphere/ESXi Familiarity with CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins) and GitOps workflows for infrastructure automation Working knowledge of AWS or Azure, including compute, networking, IAM, and hybrid connectivity (VPN, Direct Connect / ExpressRoute) is an advantage. Foundational networking knowledge: VLANs, routing, DNS, load balancing, and firewall rules in virtualized environments Experience with GitHub or GitHub Enterprise for version control, branching strategies, and pull-request-based workflows Strong communication skills and ability to produce clear technical documentation, runbooks, and architecture diagrams We’re doing work that matters. Help us solve what others can’t.