Senior Infrastructure Engineer Hyper-V Virtualization (Contract role on W2 only) || Houston, TX OR Jersey City, NJ- Onsite

Job Title: Senior Infrastructure Engineer Hyper-V Virtualization

Location: Houston, TX OR Jersey City, NJ- Onsite

Type: Contract role on W2

We're looking for a talented, senior engineering professional ready to take their career to new heights at one of the world's most influential companies.

You will engineer and operate enterprise-scale Microsoft Hyper-V virtual infrastructure across global data centers. You will apply depth and breadth of knowledge across multiple domains hypervisor platforms, storage, networking, clustering, performance engineering, and security compliance to deploy, optimize, and maintain virtual infrastructure that supports tens of thousands of workloads across multiple regions.

This role sits within the Compute Engineering team, which owns the full lifecycle of virtual infrastructure: hypervisor deployment and upgrade, cluster operations, performance engineering, storage optimization, workload management, and compliance remediation. A separate hardware engineering function handles server certification, firmware lifecycle management, and hardware lab validation. You will collaborate closely with hardware engineering evaluating hardware BOMs for performance characteristics specific to Hyper-V and providing technical feedback but your primary focus is the virtualization platform layer and above. You will work across Windows Server and Hyper-V clustering, storage subsystems, and automation tooling maintaining and extending a custom .NET-based workload management platform as needed. You will provide stewardship to other engineers through technical guidance, peer review, and design documentation. Experience with Hyper-V at enterprise scale is a strong differentiator.

Job Responsibilities

Architecture & Systems Design

• Design and maintain Hyper-V cluster architectures including failover clustering, live migration, storage configuration, and network topology across global data center pools.
• Evaluate hardware BOMs proposed by hardware engineering for Hyper-V performance characteristics processor/memory ratios, storage throughput, network bandwidth, and overcommit suitability and provide technical feedback to inform procurement decisions.
• Audit performance of complex virtual infrastructure across the full stack compute, storage, networking, and hypervisor layers and maintain architecture artifacts (high-level design documents, decision records, diagrams) using firmwide tooling.
• Develop and document reference architectures and best practices for Hyper-V cluster deployment, storage configuration, and workload placement.
• Coding
• Create and maintain automation for virtual infrastructure lifecycle management provisioning, configuration, patching, compliance enforcement, and decommissioning of Hyper-V workloads using PowerShell, WMI, and the team's .NET-based workload management platform.
• Write PowerShell scripts for host configuration management, inventory collection, cluster operations, and firmware deployment across the Hyper-V fleet.
• Maintain and extend the existing C# / .NET 8 workload management platform as needed including the server-side orchestration API, distributed worker engine, and Windows client agent components.
• Provide stewardship to other engineers in support of quality delivery peer reviewing automation scripts, infrastructure designs, and technical documentation.

Automation & Continuous Delivery

• Advocate for and implement infrastructure automation, identifying opportunities to automate, combine, or simplify operational processes with a focus on scalability versus resource use.
• Develop and maintain automation for Hyper-V host configuration, cluster provisioning, rolling upgrades, and compliance enforcement using PowerShell DSC, scripts, and the team's workload management platform.
• Support and evolve CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure automation tooling, including multi-environment deployment and automated testing.

Distributed Systems Design & Development

• Plan and execute Hyper-V cluster upgrades, Windows Server rolling upgrades, and hypervisor patch rollouts across production environments with zero or minimal downtime.
• Troubleshoot production issues across the virtual infrastructure stack hypervisor, clustering, storage, and networking layers using structured logging, event tracing, performance counters, and vendor diagnostic tools.
• Consider all risks, potential environmental impacts, and FinOps implications when designing and implementing infrastructure changes.

Data Fluency

• Identify appropriate data sources and apply appropriate methodologies when making data-based recommendations for capacity planning, performance optimization, and hardware procurement decisions.
• Conduct storage and compute performance benchmarking using industry and internal tooling (e.g., elbencho, VMFleet, diskspd) to validate hardware configurations and inform deployment decisions.
• Deliver against defined SLOs and SLAs; track and reduce events leading to errors or risks.

Cross-Functional

• Collaborate with hardware engineering on server platform evaluation, providing Hyper-V-specific performance requirements and validation feedback.
• Collaborate with vendor partners (Microsoft) on Hyper-V roadmap alignment, feature adoption, and escalation support.
• Collaborate effectively across infrastructure engineering, operations, security, and capacity planning teams.
• Leverage AI-assisted tooling for research, prototyping, and automation development to accelerate engineering cycles.
• Contribute to team and organizational goals.
• Champion the firm's culture of diversity, opportunity, inclusion, and respect.

Required Qualifications, Capabilities, and Skills

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in infrastructure engineering with demonstrated depth and breadth of knowledge across multiple domains (virtualization, storage, networking, Windows Server administration).
• Strong expertise in Microsoft Hyper-V at enterprise scale: failover clustering, live migration, storage spaces / S2D, virtual networking (Hyper-V virtual switch, SET), and Windows Server administration.
• Strong proficiency in PowerShell scripting for infrastructure automation, host configuration management, WMI-based inventory collection, and operational tooling.
• Demonstrated ability to audit performance of complex infrastructure architecture across the full stack and to maintain architecture artifacts (design documents, decision records, diagrams).
• Experience with storage performance analysis and optimization in virtualized environments benchmarking, capacity planning, and storage policy design.
• Ability to evaluate hardware BOMs for Hyper-V suitability assessing processor/memory ratios, storage I/O characteristics, network throughput, and overcommit profiles.
• Experience with infrastructure automation and configuration management tools (DSC, SCCM, Ansible, or equivalent) at data center scale.
• Experience advocating for and implementing infrastructure automation CI/CD pipelines, operational process improvement, and configuration-as-code with a focus on scalability versus resource use.
• Track record of providing stewardship to other engineers through technical guidance, design review, and documentation.
• Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field.

Preferred Qualifications, Capabilities, and Skills

• Experience with Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) at enterprise scale.
• Experience with additional hypervisors (VMware ESXi, KVM, etc.) production experience with dual-hypervisor environments are a plus.
• Familiarity with server hardware architecture (Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC, NVMe storage, GPU accelerators) sufficient to evaluate hardware proposals for Hyper-V workload suitability.
• Experience with network fabric integration in virtualized environments VLAN, SDN, load balancing, and network adapter teaming.
• Working knowledge of C# / .NET for maintaining and extending infrastructure automation platforms.
• Experience with Microsoft System Center (VMM, SCOM, SCCM) at enterprise scale.
• Experience with security compliance remediation Qualys vulnerability management, break management, and security baseline enforcement.
• Experience with performance testing frameworks (elbencho, VMFleet, diskspd, fio or similar) for storage and compute validation.
• Familiarity with using generative AI tools to accelerate engineering and research cycles.