Cloud and Automation Engineer

The Opportunity:

Mesirow is an independent, employee-owned financial services firm founded in 1937. Headquartered in Chicago, with offices around the world, we serve clients through a personal, custom approach to reaching financial goals and acting as a force for social good. With capabilities spanning Private Capital & Currency, Capital Markets & Investment Banking, and Advisory Services, we invest in what matters: our clients, our communities and our culture. We are proud of our employee-owned culture, built on collaboration and shared success, empowering our professionals to develop meaningful relationships, pursue growth opportunities and make a lasting impact for our clients and communities. Mesirow has been named one of the Best Places to Work in Chicago by Crain’s Chicago Business multiple times and is one of Barron’s Top 100 RIA firms.

The Cloud and Infrastructure team owns and operates the systems that power the business: Azure, on-premises hyperconverged infrastructure, and the networking and telephony that connect them. We are growing the team to reduce single points of ownership, build deeper coverage across our platforms, and shift more of our work from manual support toward engineering, automation, and self-service.

We're looking for a Cloud and Automation Engineer who thinks in systems, not just tools. You should be comfortable moving between cloud and on-premises environments, understand how infrastructure, identity, networking, and applications depend on one another, and be driven to replace repetitive manual work with code and process. You'll work as part of cross-functional squads alongside engineering, security, and business partners, so strong collaboration and communication matter as much as technical depth.

This role is well suited to someone who has built real depth in systems and cloud engineering, who is genuinely energized by learning new platforms and approaches, and who wants to help mature a team's practices rather than just execute a backlog.  This role is on a hybrid schedule, with office presence expected two days per week

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate infrastructure across Azure and on-premises hyperconverged environments, applying consistent engineering principles regardless of platform.
• Automate provisioning, configuration, and operational tasks using infrastructure-as-code practices, reducing manual and repetitive work across the environment.
• Partner with cross-functional squads to translate business and application requirements into resilient, secure, and maintainable infrastructure designs.
• Co-design systems and platforms with application developers, favoring immutable infrastructure patterns so environments are consistently rebuilt from code rather than patched or drifted over time.
• Contribute to the evolution of our hybrid cloud strategy: helping decide what belongs in the private data center versus Azure, and building the automation that makes those workloads portable and consistently managed.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues that span cloud, virtualization, storage, networking, and identity layers.
• Establish and document standards, patterns, and runbooks that reduce tribal knowledge and make systems easier for the team to support.
• Embed SRE principles and engineering practices into how systems are built and how the team works day to day, favoring measurable reliability, proactive detection, and repeatable process over reactive firefighting.
• Identify opportunities to insource work currently handled by external managed-service partners, and build the automation and monitoring needed to support it internally.
• Contribute to shifting the team's focus away from bespoke, hand-managed infrastructure and toward *aaS models and reusable, codified platforms, freeing capacity to focus on the systems that enable differentiated business capabilities.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and incident response, contributing to root-cause analysis and durable fixes rather than one-off remediation.
• Stay current with evolving cloud, virtualization, and automation practices, and bring new approaches back to the team.

Requirements:

Experience

• A solution-oriented systems engineering mindset, paired with continuous improvement and being easy to work with across teams.
• 5-10 years of demonstrated experience integrating and automating infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code approaches, in a public cloud (Azure preferred) and in a virtualized or hyperconverged on-premises environment.
• A track record of solving problems that cross multiple layers of the stack, not just working within a single platform or tool.
• Experience working in cross-functional or squad-based delivery models, partnering with engineers, architects, and business stakeholders outside your immediate team.

Skills and Approach

• Demonstrated experience with Terraform and Ansible, ideally applied in an Azure environment.
• Strong grounding in core systems and cloud engineering principles: availability, scalability, security, cost, and operability, and the ability to reason about trade-offs between them.
• A builder's mindset: default to automating and codifying solutions rather than performing repeated manual work.
• A drive to optimize and re-engineer processes where it makes sense, rather than simply automating what's done today as-is.
• Comfort operating across a hybrid environment, understanding how workload placement decisions affect cost, performance, resiliency, and support burden.
• Strong troubleshooting instincts and the ability to work back from symptoms to root cause across interdependent systems.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to document designs and standards that other engineers can follow.
• A genuine appetite for learning: comfortable picking up new platforms, tools, and practices as the environment evolves, rather than anchoring to a fixed toolset.
• Good judgment about when to build, when to buy, and when to simplify rather than automate around unnecessary complexity.
• A reuse- and security-first mindset, applied in a way that keeps sight of user and developer experience rather than adding friction for its own sake.

Nice to Have

• Exposure to identity and access management, networking, or telephony systems in addition to core infrastructure.
• Experience contributing to architecture decisions or documentation (e.g., ADRs) rather than only implementing them.
• Familiarity with reducing reliance on outsourced managed services through internal automation and tooling.
• Experience working in a highly regulated financial services environment, including familiarity with the risk, compliance, and change-control expectations common there.

In accordance with the Illinois Pay Transparency Law, the anticipated hiring base salary for the role will be between $145,000 and $175,000 per year. However, base pay if hired will be determined on an individualized basis and is only part of the total compensation package, which, also provides the opportunity for a bonus and the Mesirow benefit program.

EOE