Senior System Engineer, GIOC

Who We Are Vultr is on a mission to make high-performance cloud infrastructure easy to use, affordable, and locally accessible for enterprises and AI innovators around the world. With 33 global cloud data center locations, Vultr is trusted by hundreds of thousands of active customers across 185 countries for its flexible, scalable, global Cloud Compute, Cloud GPU, Bare Metal, and Cloud Storage solutions. In December 2024 Vultr announced an equity financing at a $3.5 billion valuation. Founded by David Aninowsky and self-funded for over a decade, Vultr has grown to become the world’s largest privately-held cloud infrastructure company. Vultr Cares Medical Insurance stipend paid annually 9 Company-Paid Holidays Generous Leave Policy + 1 month paid sabbatical every 5 years + Anniversary Bonus each year Professional Development Reimbursement Internet reimbursement Fitness membership reimbursement Company paid Wellable subscription Join Vultr Vultr is expanding its India presence and is building its first Global Integrated Operations Command Center (GIOC) in Chennai — the 24x7 nerve center for monitoring, triage, and first response across Vultr’s global cloud, systems, network, and security operations. We are seeking Senior Systems Engineers to serve as the first line of response for Vultr’s systems estate — compute, storage, operating systems, and virtualization. This is a frontline operations role for engineers who thrive in a fast-paced, alert-driven environment and want to grow into deeper SRE, systems, and platform engineering careers. You must be comfortable working a rotational shift model — including nights, weekends, and holidays — to sustain follow-the-sun coverage. Role Overview The Senior Systems Engineer is the entry point of the GIOC incident lifecycle. You monitor health signals across Vultr’s systems estate, acknowledge and triage alerts within defined first-response SLAs, execute documented runbooks to resolve common issues, and escalate cleanly to Senior Engineers when an issue falls outside L2 scope. The role ensures fast, accurate first response that protects customer experience and keeps incidents moving toward resolution. You operate from a consolidated single-pane-of-glass dashboard, classifying and routing incidents by severity and tower while owning accurate, complete documentation of every action. Success is measured by first-response SLA adherence, triage accuracy, and runbook resolution rate. The role runs on a rotational schedule to sustain 24x7 coverage. Key Responsibilities Alert Monitoring & First Response Monitor systems-estate health signals (compute, storage, OS, virtualization) from a consolidated single-pane-of-glass dashboard Acknowledge alerts and incidents within first-response SLA targets Perform initial review — read the alert, check recent changes, and review the CMDB before acting Triage & Severity Classification Classify each incident by severity and customer impact, confirming the owning tower (Systems / Network / Security / cross-tower) Route and assign tickets accurately to the correct tower or escalation path Sustain triage accuracy at or above the GIOC go-live standard Reassess severity as impact evolves, and declare higher when in doubt Runbook-Driven Resolution Match alert signatures to documented runbooks and execute permitted L2 actions Resolve common, well-understood systems issues end to end within L2 scope Document every step taken, with supporting evidence, in the incident ticket Escalation & Handoff Escalate unresolved or out-of-scope issues to L2/L3 with a clean, complete handoff (symptom · evidence collected · steps tried · current state) Flag missing or ineffective runbooks as runbook gaps for review and continuous improvement Initiate and support major-incident (Sev-0 / Sev-1) bridges per the escalation matrix Track escalations to closure and confirm service is restored before resolving the ticket Operational Documentation & Communication Maintain accurate shift logs, t