Senior Systems Engineer II

Location: Texas

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

Elsevier is seeking a Senior Systems Engineer II to join our technology team in designing, building, and maintaining the AWS-based infrastructure that powers our global information platforms. In this role, you will take ownership of complex systems engineering initiatives — from cloud architecture and automation to performance tuning and reliability engineering — while serving as a technical mentor to junior engineers on the team. You'll partner closely with software development, security, and operations teams to ensure our systems are scalable, resilient, and secure, supporting the mission-critical research and health data products relied on by millions of researchers, clinicians, and institutions worldwide.

This is a hands-on senior role for someone who thrives on solving hard infrastructure problems, driving automation and best practices, and contributing to the technical direction of a growing systems engineering function.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and maintain scalable, highly available infrastructure on AWS, leveraging services such as EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, VPC, and IAM.
• Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and/or AWS CloudFormation to enable repeatable, auditable deployments.
• Develop and improve CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins) to support automated testing, deployment, and rollback processes.
• Own monitoring, logging, and alerting strategy using tools such as CloudWatch, Datadog, or the Prometheus/Grafana stack to ensure system health and rapid incident response.
• Lead root-cause analysis for complex production incidents and drive long-term remediation and resilience improvements.
• Design and implement disaster recovery, backup, and business continuity strategies across AWS environments.
• Champion cloud security best practices, including IAM least-privilege design, network segmentation, encryption standards, and compliance with relevant frameworks (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA where applicable).
• Identify and implement cost optimization strategies across compute, storage, and networking resources.
• Collaborate with software engineering teams to support scalable application architecture, container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS), and microservices infrastructure.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to junior and mid-level systems engineers; participate in code/design reviews.
• Contribute to on-call rotation and incident response processes, providing senior-level escalation support.
• Document system architecture, runbooks, and operational procedures to support knowledge sharing across teams.
• Evaluate and pilot new AWS services and tools to improve platform capability, reliability, and efficiency.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in systems engineering, infrastructure engineering, or a related discipline, with significant hands-on AWS experience.
• Strong working knowledge of core AWS services: EC2, S3, VPC, IAM, RDS, Lambda, CloudWatch, and either ECS or EKS.
• Proven experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar).
• Proficiency in scripting/automation languages such as Python, Bash, or Go.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling and building automated deployment pipelines.
• Solid understanding of networking fundamentals (DNS, load balancing, VPNs, VPC peering/Transit Gateway).
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Demonstrated experience troubleshooting complex, distributed production systems under time pressure.
• Strong understanding of security best practices in cloud environments.
• Excellent communication skills, with experience mentoring less-experienced engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS certification(s) such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate/Professional or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer.
• Experience working in a regulated industry (health data, research, financial services, or similar) with compliance requirements (HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2).
• Experience with configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, or Puppet).
• Familiarity with observability platforms (Datadog, New Relic, Splunk) in addition to native AWS tooling.
• Experience supporting large-scale, high-traffic SaaS or data platforms.
• Exposure to multi-account AWS Organizations, Control Tower, or landing zone architectures.

U.S. National Base Pay Range: $95,300 - $158,800. Geographic differentials may apply in some locations to better reflect local market rates. This job is eligible for an annual incentive bonus.

We know your well-being and happiness are key to a long and successful career. We are delighted to offer country specific benefits. Click here to access benefits specific to your location.

We are committed to providing a fair and accessible hiring process. If you have a disability or other need that requires accommodation or adjustment, please let us know by completing our Applicant Request Support Form or please contact 1-855-833-5120.

Criminals may pose as recruiters asking for money or personal information. We never request money or banking details from job applicants. Learn more about spotting and avoiding scams here.

Please read our Candidate Privacy Policy.

We are an equal opportunity employer: qualified applicants are considered for and treated during employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship status, disability status, protected veteran status, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.

USA Job Seekers:

EEO Know Your Rights.