Systems Engineer, Sr
POSITION SUMMARY:
The Senior Systems Architect will design, build, and support the core infrastructure for Company 3 and SDFX, spanning post-production, color, finishing, editorial, VFX, and audio mixing environments.
This role owns the architecture for studio infrastructure, ensuring reliability, performance, scalability, and security as production demands grow. The successful candidate will bring deep expertise in network architecture, virtualization technologies, high-performance storage, and complex problem-solving.
The Senior Systems Architect will collaborate closely with Global Engineering, Software Development, Information Security, Production Operations, and local studio leadership at Company 3 and SDFX to align infrastructure architecture with business objectives and production requirements.
MAIN DUTIES:
Technical Leadership & Mentorship: The Systems Engineer, Sr will serve as a senior technical authority and the final escalation point for complex infrastructure issues. They will mentor Systems Engineers through design reviews, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing.
- Provide technical direction for infrastructure priorities, design decisions, and project execution.
- Establish engineering standards and best practices for infrastructure design, change management, and documentation.
Infrastructure Architecture & Engineering: They will architect, build, and support high-performance infrastructure, including render infrastructure, storage systems, virtualization platforms, cloud resources, servers, and network services. They will design, administer, and optimize Isilon storage, Quantum StorNext, Ceph storage clusters, Fibre Channel fabrics, and Proxmox virtualization environments. Design highly available, resilient, and secure infrastructure to support post-production and VFX workflows.
- Lead advanced troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and long-term remediation of infrastructure-level issues.
- Design monitoring, capacity planning, and performance strategies that scale with production demand.
- Define infrastructure improvements, modernization initiatives, and lifecycle plans.
Production Infrastructure Support: They must partner with Production, Operations, and Facility Leadership to translate current and future project requirements into infrastructure designs, ensuring infrastructure capacity and performance meet production demands across Company 3 and SDFX.
- Work with local and global teams to design for resilience and minimize operational disruptions.
- Architect and support the integration of new production technologies and workflow improvements.
Project Delivery & Strategic Initiatives: Lead infrastructure design, deployment, upgrades, and migrations from planning through delivery. Evaluate technology vendors, products, and service providers against architectural and production requirements. Provide management with comparative analyses, risk assessments, and technical recommendations.
- Collaborate with global technology teams to align architecture, standards, and operational practices.
- Shape infrastructure architecture plans and long-term technology roadmaps.
Operational Excellence: Drive continuous improvement across infrastructure design, automation, and engineering processes. Develop and maintain architecture documentation, design standards, and runbooks. Analyze systems for performance, throughput, reliability, scalability, and security, then design improvements accordingly.
- Provide senior engineering support for critical incidents and planned infrastructure maintenance.
- Design infrastructure that complies with Company 3 security policies, industry best practices, and customer security requirements.
WHAT YOU BRING:
The ideal candidate will be well-seasoned professional in Systems Engineering or Infrastructure Engineering, including designing and architecting enterprise infrastructure. They must have prior experience designing and supporting enterprise infrastructure across media, post-production, VFX, broadcast, or related creative industries. As well as advanced knowledge of Linux systems engineering, enterprise storage architecture, network infrastructure and services, virtualization platforms, cloud computing platforms, and identity and access management. They will also have prior hands-on experience designing and managing Isilon storage, Quantum StorNext, Fibre Channel, Proxmox, and Ceph. Additional desired skills include:
- Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis capabilities.
- Excellent written, verbal, and organizational communication skills.
- Strong documentation skills and exceptional attention to detail.
- Ability to manage competing priorities in a fast-paced production environment.
- Strong decision-making skills and sound technical judgment.
- An architect's mindset, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and long-term design.
- Ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on technical execution.
- Ability to remain calm and effective during critical operational events.
- A collaborative approach with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience designing infrastructure for color, editorial, finishing, VFX, rendering, or production workflows is a plus.
- Experience with infrastructure automation is a plus.
- Experience architecting hybrid cloud infrastructure and large-scale storage environments is a plus.
- Experience supporting distributed global teams is a plus.
- Experience in security, compliance, or operational resilience initiatives is a plus.
ABOUT THE COMPANY:
Company 3, including its various business units and family of brands, provides a full range of Creative Services for content creators, including conceptual design, pre-vis, look development, ideation and rapid prototyping, 3D animation/CGI, motion graphics/designers, matte painting, compositing, dailies and production services, color grading, post-production finishing, marketing/trailers, live-action production, experiences, and more.
Diversity and Inclusion at Company 3:
Creativity has diversity at its core. We celebrate the value of each unique experience by being dedicated to fostering the most diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture where every employee feels empowered and safe to show up to work as their full self.
It is our policy to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees. Please inform the Company's HR representative if you need assistance completing any forms or otherwise need any accommodation or support in order to participate in the application process.