Infrastructure & Cloud Systems Engineer

About This Opportunity CTI Staffing is partnering with a well-established professional services organization to find an Infrastructure & Cloud Systems Engineer for their IT infrastructure team based in Chicago, IL (hybrid, 3 days onsite). This is a 6-month contract-to-hire opening with two positions available. This team owns a true hybrid environment: an enterprise on-premises data center alongside a growing Azure footprint.

They are investing in automation, Infrastructure as Code, and disaster recovery maturity, and they need engineers who take ownership rather than wait for tickets.

What You'll Do

Administer and optimize VMware v. Sphere/v. Center environments, including cluster management, DRS/HA policies, and resource and license optimization Design, deploy, and maintain Azure infrastructure across compute, networking, storage, and identity, including Entra ID and Conditional Access Manage enterprise server and composable infrastructure platforms, including firmware baselines, hardware health, and vendor-coordinated lifecycle management Own SAN/NAS storage administration: LUN provisioning, replication, snapshots, performance tuning, and capacity forecasting Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, ARM templates, or Bicep, plus CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions Design, execute, and document disaster recovery and failover tests against defined RTO/RPO targets Automate patching, provisioning, and compliance workflows using Power.

Shell, Ansible, Python, or Azure CLI Participate in on-call rotation and partner with security and development teams as an escalation point Requirements What You Bring Must-Have: 8+ years of hands-on infrastructure engineering or systems administration in enterprise production environments Deep VMware v. Sphere/v. Center expertise: cluster administration, DRS/HA, vSAN, resource management 5+ years with Microsoft Azure: Compute, Networking, Storage, Entra ID, Key Vault, and hybrid connectivity (Express.

Route, VPN) Hands-on experience with enterprise compute platforms and composable infrastructure management tooling Enterprise storage administration experience (SAN/NAS): LUN management, replication, performance tuning Infrastructure as Code experience with Terraform or ARM/Bicep and configuration management (Ansible, DSC, or equivalent) Strong scripting in Power.

Shell, Python, Azure CLI, or Bash Proven disaster recovery design and failover testing experience (Zerto, Azure Site Recovery, Veeam, or equivalent) US Citizenship required Nice-to-Have: Azure certifications (AZ-104, AZ-305) VMware Certified Professional (VCP-DCV) Enterprise hardware vendor certifications Experience in regulated or compliance-driven environments (SOC 2, NIST, ISO 27001) Monitoring and observability platform experience (Azure Monitor, Datadog, SCOM) Technical Environment: VMware v.

Sphere/v. Center, Azure, Entra ID, Terraform, ARM/Bicep, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Power. Shell, Ansible, Python, Active Directory, Windows Server, enterprise SAN/NAS storage What Success Looks Like: DR/failover tests executed and documented against RTO/RPO targets within the first two quarters Core provisioning workflows moved to Infrastructure as Code with auditable, repeatable deployments Measurable cost and license optimization across both virtualization and cloud environments