Lead Systems Engineer

Build resilient infrastructure. Lead complex engineering. Put advanced automation into practice.

Arnold & Porter is seeking a Lead Systems Engineer to help modernize and support the global infrastructure behind our legal practice. If you enjoy solving difficult systems challenges, building reliable automation, and taking complex infrastructure projects from planning through production, this role offers the opportunity to make a meaningful impact.

As a senior, hands-on technical leader, you will engineer solutions across on-premises, colocation, hybrid, and Microsoft Azure environments. You will lead migrations, strengthen recovery capabilities, and develop production automation while working closely with Architecture, Network Engineering, Information Security, and application teams.

This is an individual contributor leadership role with no direct reports, ideal for an experienced engineer who wants to remain deeply technical while mentoring colleagues and influencing engineering standards.

This role may work fully remote in a firm approved U.S. state.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead infrastructure implementations. Take ownership of assigned solutions from requirements and design validation through deployment, testing, operational handoff, and ongoing support.
• Advance our Azure environment. Deploy and optimize production infrastructure spanning compute, storage, identity integration, monitoring, security, governance, and availability.
• Deliver complex migrations. Plan and execute workload moves across on-premises, virtualized, hosted, and Azure platforms, including dependency mapping, testing, cutover, rollback, and stabilization.
• Build powerful, reusable automation. Develop PowerShell modules, API integrations, and infrastructure-as-code that improve provisioning, configuration, patching, validation, and operations. Establish standards for secure, tested, and maintainable code.
• Engineer core enterprise platforms. Support Windows Server, applicable Linux systems, Active Directory, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, DFS, virtualization, compute clusters, and enterprise storage.
• Strengthen reliability and recovery. Improve backup, replication, disaster recovery, and failover capabilities; validate recovery against business requirements; and enhance monitoring, performance, and capacity planning.
• Solve challenging production issues. Serve as a senior escalation resource, investigate failures across interconnected platforms, and lead root-cause analysis and lasting corrective actions.
• Integrate security into delivery. Apply hardening, least privilege, vulnerability remediation, logging, and governance requirements through disciplined production changes.
• Provide technical leadership. Mentor engineers, conduct design and code reviews, maintain clear documentation, and coordinate technical dependencies across teams and vendors.
• Apply approved AI engineering tools. Use authorized assistants to support scripting, testing, troubleshooting, and documentation while validating results and protecting confidential information.

Participation in on-call escalation, critical incident response, and scheduled work outside regular business hours is required as business needs dictate.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 10 or more years of hands-on enterprise infrastructure engineering experience, including five or more years as a senior engineer or technical lead.
• A demonstrated record of delivering complex production implementations, upgrades, migrations, and recovery solutions in large organizations operating across locations and time zones.
• Advanced PowerShell engineering expertise, including reusable modules, advanced functions, remoting, and API integrations. Experience owning production automation used across multiple teams is essential.
• Strong software engineering practices for automation, including version control, peer review, automated testing, structured error handling, logging, secure secrets management, and controlled releases.
• Advanced practical knowledge of Windows Server, Active Directory, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, DFS, authentication, and server security, along with working knowledge of Linux and hybrid identity.
• Hands-on Azure infrastructure experience, including IaaS workloads, storage, networking dependencies, RBAC, policies, monitoring, availability, and migration tools.
• Strong experience with enterprise virtualization, clustering, SAN/NAS storage, Fibre Channel/iSCSI connectivity, replication, and performance troubleshooting.
• Practical knowledge of hybrid networking dependencies, including TCP/IP, routing, private DNS, firewalls, private endpoints, and ExpressRoute/BGP concepts.
• Experience implementing and testing backup, restore, disaster recovery, and failover capabilities across on-premises and cloud environments.
• Sound judgment, clear communication, and the ability to investigate unfamiliar systems, explain technical tradeoffs, and develop supportable solutions.

A bachelor’s degree in information technology, computer science, engineering, or a related field is preferred; equivalent relevant experience will be considered. Experience in legal services or another security-sensitive or regulated environment is also preferred.

Additional experience with Bash, Microsoft Graph, Terraform/Bicep, Ansible, Git, Docker, Python, Pester, Desired State Configuration, or Azure Kubernetes Service is welcome. Familiarity with firm-approved AI coding assistants is helpful; expertise in a particular AI product is not required.

About Arnold & Porter

Arnold & Porter is an international law firm with offices throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. The firm advises clients on complex regulatory, litigation, and transactional matters across a broad range of industries, including many of the world’s leading companies and organizations.

Please submit a resume and cover letter for consideration.

The anticipated base salary for this position is $124,489 to $160,000. The actual base salary offered will depend on a variety of factors, including without limitation, the qualifications of the individual applicant for the position, years of relevant experience, level of education attained, certifications or other professional licenses held, and if applicable, the location in which the applicant lives and/or from which they will be performing the job.

The firm may provide a discretionary bonus annually.

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