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.

Cadence is a pivotal leader in electronic design building upon more than 30 years of computational software expertise. The company applies its underlying Intelligent System Design strategy to deliver software hardware and IP that turn design concepts into reality.

Cadence customers are the worlds most innovative companies delivering extraordinary electronic products from chips to boards to systems for the most dynamic market applications including consumer hyperscale computing 5G communications automotive aerospace industrial and health.

At Cadence we hire and develop leaders and innovators who want to make an impact on the world of technology.

Job Title: Staff Systems Engineer

Location: Cork or Dublin Ireland

Reports to: Sr IT Architect

Job Overview:

As a Staff Systems Engineer within our Infrastructure team you will design build and maintain the automation frameworks and virtualization platforms that underpin Cadences global engineering environment. Your work directly improves the reliability scalability and security of critical on-premises and hybrid cloud infrastructure that thousands of engineers depend on every day.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role at the intersection of infrastructure automation cloud integration and platform engineering - where you will collaborate closely with senior architects while mentoring the next generation of infrastructure engineers.

You will join a collaborative globally distributed Infrastructure team that partners closely with Platform Engineering Security and Cloud Architecture stakeholders. The team operates with a GitOps-first mindset and a strong culture of peer review documentation and continuous improvement.

Primary tooling includes: Terraform Ansible Python GitHub Enterprise GitHub Actions Nutanix Prism VMware vSphere Prometheus Grafana and Datadog. Cloud environments span AWS and Azure.

Some flexibility in working hours may be required for collaboration with global teams.

Job 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 across multi-environment deployments.
• Write and maintain Python and Bash automation scripts that reduce manual operational overhead integrate tooling across the stack and support CI/CD pipeline functionality.
• 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 optimise virtualization platforms including Nutanix (AHV Prism AOS) KVM and VMware vSphere/ESXi - ensuring performance availability and capacity targets are consistently met.
• Support hybrid cloud operations across AWS and/or Azure integrating on-premises infrastructure with cloud services using automation-first practices and GitOps workflows.
• Contribute to infrastructure design discussions providing well-reasoned input on architecture decisions related to automation virtualization HCI and cloud integration.
• Monitor infrastructure health using observability tooling (e.g. Prometheus Grafana Datadog) respond to incidents and lead root-cause analysis and remediation efforts.
• Develop and maintain clear documentation for automation frameworks runbooks and infrastructure standards to ensure operational consistency and effective knowledge sharing.
• Participate in security and compliance reviews applying hardening practices and policy-as-code principles across infrastructure pipelines.
• Mentor junior engineers through pair programming code review and knowledge transfer - helping grow team capability and reinforce an automation-first culture.

Job Qualifications:

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering or a related field or equivalent professional experience.
• 58 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 or VMware vSphere/ESXi.
• Familiarity with CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions GitLab CI or Jenkins) and GitOps workflows for infrastructure automation.
• 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 written and verbal communication skills with a track record of producing clear technical documentation runbooks and architecture diagrams.

Additional Skills/Preferences:

• Working knowledge of AWS or Azure including compute networking IAM and hybrid connectivity (VPN Direct Connect or ExpressRoute).
• Experience with policy-as-code frameworks such as Open Policy Agent (OPA) or Sentinel.
• Familiarity with container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes Helm) in infrastructure contexts.
• Exposure to infrastructure security tooling and compliance frameworks (CIS Benchmarks NIST SOC 2).
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure tooling or internal developer platforms.

Check what we can offer you:

• Competitive salary
• 25 days holiday per year
• Private Medical and Dental plans Income Protection and Life Insurance
• Group Personal Pension Plan
• Cycle to work scheme and gym subsidy
• 5 days paid time to volunteer to give back to our communities
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• The opportunity to work for a Great Place to Work & Fortune 100 organization

Cadence is committed to equal employment opportunity and employment equity throughout all levels of the organization. We strive to attract a qualified and diverse candidate pool and encourage diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

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