# Senior Systems Engineer II - Edge Platform & Packaging

**Company:** [Dispel](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/dispel)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** DevOps / SRE
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Linux, Systemd, Debian, Apt, Oci, Docker, Go, Rust, Python, C, Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Networking
**Posted:** 2026-08-03

> Owns the systems that build, package, update, secure, and observe software running on customer-hosted edge appliances. The role requires 5+ years of infrastructure engineering experience, deep Linux expertise, release and rollback ownership, and proficiency with systems languages, packaging, IaC, containers, and CI/CD.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities

### Packaging and Release Engineering
- Own build and packaging pipelines for on-premises deliverables, including OS images, packages, container images, and installable release bundles.
- Make builds reproducible and verifiable with pinned inputs, deterministic outputs, signed artifacts, and an SBOM for every release.
- Design versioning and compatibility models across appliance, cloud-side, and orchestration components.
- Consolidate bespoke packaging into a small set of supported paths.
- Automate appliance provisioning with an idempotent process.

### Updatability
- Own update delivery, staging, application, verification, and rollback for constrained-link, maintenance-window, and air-gapped appliances.
- Design recovery from interrupted or faulty updates without requiring a site visit.
- Build fleet-level release controls, including staged rollouts, cohorts, canaries, drift visibility, and rollout hold or reversal mechanisms.
- Reduce and measure the time between CVE publication and fleet patching.
- Maintain update compatibility across the OS baseline and kernel lifecycle.

### Edge Processing
- Extend the appliance runtime for local telemetry collection and preprocessing, buffering and store-and-forward, and local decisioning.
- Define edge-versus-cloud responsibilities using bandwidth, latency, and data-residency evidence.
- Manage resource usage so added workloads do not starve network functions on constrained hardware.
- Design local observability that enables support engineers to reconstruct appliance behavior without shell access.

### Reliability, Security, and Quality
- Own on-premises supply-chain integrity, including signing keys, trust roots, artifact provenance, and audit evidence.
- Build appliance-in-the-loop tests and exercise upgrade, downgrade, hardware, and near-hardware validation before releases reach customers.
- Ensure performance, scalability, and security requirements are met, particularly where packaging and runtime choices affect network data paths.
- Participate in incident response and root-cause analysis for remote field failures.

### Cross-Functional Communication
- Participate in an on-call rotation and provide after-hours incident troubleshooting as needed.
- Partner with field, support, and customer-facing engineering teams.
- Work with security and compliance teams to make releases evidence-producing by default.
- Advise product and engineering leadership on edge capabilities and constraints.
- Write runbooks, upgrade notes, and architecture documentation.
- Mentor junior engineers through code review, pairing, and technical context sharing.
- Participate in interview-loop evaluations.

## Requirements

- **5+ years** of professional engineering experience shipping software on infrastructure you do not operate.
- Ownership of release and update mechanisms for edge, appliance, embedded, or on-premises enterprise systems.
- Deep Linux systems knowledge, including systemd, boot and init, filesystem and partition layout, kernel and package lifecycles, and distribution assembly.
- Strong packaging and distribution experience with Debian/apt packaging, OCI images, image-based or A/B update schemes, or equivalent.
- Experience with artifact signing and repository operation.
- Proficiency in at least one systems-capable language: Go, Rust, Python, or C.
- Comfort reading code across the layers being packaged.
- Experience using coding agents such as GitHub Copilot or Claude Code.
- Infrastructure-as-code proficiency, especially Ansible and Terraform.
- Container runtime and orchestration experience, including judgment about constrained nodes versus datacenters.
- CI/CD experience with Terraform, GitHub Actions, or similar, including pipelines that produce release artifacts.
- Solid networking fundamentals, including routing, DNS, firewalls, and VPN concepts.
- Ability to define requirements and deliver results with cross-functional stakeholders and minimal oversight.
- Willingness to accept feedback, learn, and iterate.
- Clear and succinct written and verbal communication.

## Nice-to-Haves

- Experience shipping into OT, ICS, or industrial environments.
- Experience with air-gapped or intermittently connected deployments, offline mirrors, or sneakernet update paths.
- Security-focused product experience involving reliability and regulatory compliance, including IEC 62443, NERC CIP, FIPS-validated cryptography, or FedRAMP-adjacent work.
- Supply-chain security experience with SLSA or in-toto.

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