Staff System Administrator (Hardware & Infrastructure) in Santa Clara, California at Upscale, Inc.
Job Description
Why join Upscale, Inc.
Upscale, Inc., is building the high-performance infrastructure powering the next generation of artificial intelligence. Backed by over $500M in funding and rapid global adoption, we are scaling systems designed for the world’s most demanding AI workloads.
We focus on first-principles engineering across silicon, systems, and networking—where performance, scale, and execution are critical. Our team is talent-dense and high-performing. We value ownership, technical rigor, and speed, and we offer the opportunity to work on foundational problems with immediate, real-world impact.
If you’re looking to do high-impact work, move fast, and help define the infrastructure behind the future of AI—Upscale is where you can produce meaningful work at the frontier—and operate at a high standard.
Role Summary:
We are seeking an experienced, hands-on Staff System Administrator (Hardware & Infrastructure) to support day-to-day operations of our corporate infrastructure and engineering environments in Santa Clara. This role balances deep enterprise Systems Administration with active, hands-on Lab & Data Center Operations ("Smart Hands"). In this role, you will be directly involved with our bare-metal compute fleets, standardizing provisioning workflows, automation, and everyday system administration tasks. You'll partner closely with hardware, software, and ASIC validation teams. We're looking for someone comfortable across both physical data center work and enterprise system administration.
Responsibilities:
Lab Infrastructure & Systems Administration: Support, provision, and maintain bare-metal RedHat/Rocky Linux fleets, Proxmox hypervisor clusters, and high-throughput lab storage solutions (NFS/SMB).
Automation & Fleet Management: Leverage scalable automation frameworks like Ansible, Python, and Bash to streamline server imaging, configuration drift management, and CI/lab provisioning.
Physical Operations & Fleet Bring-Up: Drive and execute data center operations, including rack-and-stack standards, structured cabling topology, power/cooling considerations, and end-to-end server bring-up for prototype hardware.
Networking & Observability: Administer DNS/DHCP infrastructure and IP allocation; troubleshoot complex L2/L3 network connectivity; and monitor telemetry pipelines for fleet health monitoring.
Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner closely with Systems, Silicon, and Validation engineering leads to establish lab standards, define expansion roadmaps, and eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks.
Requirements:
8+ years of hands-on experience in enterprise systems administration, high-density infrastructure engineering, or data center systems engineering (a career progression from physical data center operations into advanced systems engineering is highly valued).
Demonstrated technical mastery of enterprise Linux (RedHat / Rocky Linux) internals, deep troubleshooting, and hypervisor management (Proxmox, KVM, or equivalent).
Experience with production automation and tooling with Ansible, Python, or Bash, alongside Git-based version control.
Demonstrated hands-on data center proficiency: rack layout design, structured cabling, multi-node server bring-up, and component/board-level troubleshooting.
Solid enterprise networking fundamentals, including DNS, DHCP, IPAM, VLAN trunking, and L2/L3 routing and connectivity diagnostics.
Production experience with at least one major public cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
Active comfort utilizing frontier AI models and developer tooling to accelerate automation and administrative productivity.
Preferred Qualifications:
Advanced telemetry and observability design using Prometheus, Grafana, and time-series monitoring platforms.
Hands-on deployment of FreeIPA identity management, PXE boot/iPXE zero-touch environments, local package repositories, and automated network backup pipelines.
Direct experience supporting high-density compute labs, GPU/accelerator testbeds, or large-scale HPC compute clusters.
Where you fall within that range depends on your experience, skills, and impact—we benchmark against internal levels to keep things fair and consistent.
Equal Opportunity
Upscale, Inc., is building a team that reflects a wide range of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. We’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and consider all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or veteran status.
Accessibility & Accommodations
We’re committed to making our hiring process accessible to everyone. If you need accommodations at any stage, just reach out to us at hiring@upscaleai.com—we’re happy to help. Note: This inbox is only for accommodation requests.
$175,000 - $193,000 a year
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