Senior IT Systems Engineer (Defense Technology)

Location: Huntington Beach, California, United States. Ability to travel is required, with extended hours and weekends as needed. U.S. work authorization or eligibility for required ITAR authorizations is required.

Salary: $150,000–$175,000 USD per year base salary.

Company

Mach Industries is a rapidly growing defense technology company founded in 2023 that develops next-generation autonomous defense platforms and scalable decentralized defense systems.

What you will do

• Build reference architectures, deployment blueprints, and repeatable rollout models for offices, warehouses, production environments, and remote locations.
• Drive infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and operational automation for provisioning, patching, compliance, backups, certificates, and access management.
• Oversee enterprise systems administration, operations, availability, performance, lifecycle management, and disaster readiness.
• Improve reliability through standardized recovery procedures, automation, and resilient support models.
• Implement security and compliance controls aligned with NIST, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and CMMC, including SSO, MFA, PAM, RBAC, and conditional access.
• Translate business needs into technical execution plans and help establish infrastructure standards and deployment models for a growing multi-site organization.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of systems engineering or infrastructure engineering experience.
• Deep experience supporting complex enterprise environments across cloud and on-premises systems.
• Strong hands-on automation and scripting experience with PowerShell, Python, Bash, or similar technologies.
• Experience building and maintaining infrastructure as code and configuration automation with Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, or similar tools.
• Experience with CI/CD platforms such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or Azure DevOps.
• Strong expertise in Windows, Linux, virtualization, identity systems, endpoint management, cloud platforms, backup and recovery, and enterprise systems operations.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, logging, operational health tooling, systems security, access control, hardening, and vulnerability remediation.
• Ability to travel and availability to work extended hours and weekends as needed.
• Must be a U.S. citizen or national, lawful permanent resident, refugee, asylee, or eligible to obtain the required U.S. Department of State authorizations for ITAR-controlled information.

Nice to have

• Experience in regulated or compliance-driven environments such as defense, manufacturing, aerospace, or similar industries.
• Exposure to NIST 800-171, CMMC, SOC 2, ISO 27001, or related security and compliance standards.
• Experience with SRE-style operational practices, service reliability, or platform engineering initiatives.
• Experience integrating enterprise IT systems with software delivery pipelines and cloud-native tooling.
• Working knowledge of containers, artifact repositories, secrets management, and service orchestration.
• Experience automating identity lifecycle management, PKI and certificates, patching, endpoint deployment, or compliance validation.
• Experience supporting standardized infrastructure deployments for branch offices, warehouses, or production sites.
• Relevant certifications such as Microsoft, AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, VMware, CISSP, RHCSA/RHCE, or similar.

Culture & Benefits

• Startup agility with a focus on rapid innovation, advanced manufacturing, and national security.
• Performance-based incentives and equity participation through stock options or equity.
• Healthcare, dental, vision, retirement savings, and paid time off.
• Funding for continuing education, training, and career growth.
• Transparent compensation practices and competitive salary research.