Senior Systems Engineer II

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) w