SysOps Engineer

Emplacement

Remote

Engagement

Full-time Remote

Kinsta is one of the top-managed WordPress hosting companies, with a growing club of 120,000+ businesses including startups, universities and Fortune 500 firms. We're motivated by excellent quality, and proud to have received a 97% satisfaction rating from our customers.

That's because, to us, each day is a chance to grow. As a team, we continuously inspire each other to learn new and better ways to make an impact. We own our jobs proudly - our leaders don't hold our hands, but they're in our corner whenever we ask for help - and our environment is flexible and remote-first.

The SysOps Engineer is responsible for ensuring the ongoing reliability and smooth operation of Kinsta’s hosting infrastructure. Working within the engineering team, SysOps engineers focus on monitoring, maintaining, and supporting the systems that host customer sites, acting as the frontline owners of production stability. They own infrastructure issues end-to-end: from detection and mitigation through root cause analysis, follow-up actions, and long-term fixes.

This role demands a strong sense of ownership and collaboration. SysOps engineers work closely with Support, DevOps, Security, Development, and other teams to diagnose problems, restore service, and drive improvements that reduce operational risk. While incident response is a core responsibility, SysOps engineers are expected to continuously reduce manual work and operational risk through automation, tooling, and system improvements. Their work combines short-term responsiveness with long-term thinking to ensure the platform remains reliable as it grows.

Shift: Saturday - Wednesday Work hours: Saturday & Sunday 12 PM - 8 PM UTC, Weekdays 2 pm - 10 PM UTC

What You'll Do:

• Own the day-to-day health of production systems, responding to incidents with calm execution, clear communication, and a focus on restoring service quickly.
• Investigate incidents to understand root causes and drive meaningful improvements that reduce future risk.
• Continuously improve platform observability, ensuring monitoring and alerting are actionable, correctly prioritized, and aligned with real customer impact while reducing noise.
• Embed security into every operational activity through timely patching, system hardening, and adherence to security best practices.
• Collaborate closely with Security and engineering teams to investigate vulnerabilities, respond to threats, and strengthen defenses over time.
• Build and refine automation that reduces manual work, improves consistency, and makes systems easier to operate at scale.
• Deliver infrastructure changes with care and discipline by following change management processes, validating changes end-to-end, and ensuring deployments are safe and well communicated.
• Drive efficiency by simplifying systems, improving operational workflows, and monitoring capacity, performance, and cost to ensure sustainable scaling.
• Work closely with Support, DevOps, Security, Development, and other teams, providing clear communication, actionable handovers, and shared operational context.
• Take full ownership of issues from detection through resolution and follow-up, maintaining accurate runbooks and documentation while keeping customer experience at the center of all decision.s

What You'll Bring to the role:

• Strong Ubuntu / Linux server administration experience.
• Experience running container-based Linux systems in production, supporting stateful web workloads (e.g. WordPress or similar PHP-based platforms).
• Background in managed hosting or SaaS infrastructure, with responsibility for uptime, customer impact, and incident response.
• Solid understanding of PHP, Nginx and MySQL/MariaDB in production.
• Experience working with at least one major cloud provider (GCP, OCI, AWS, Azure).
• Hands-on automation experience (Bash, Python, Ansible, Terraform, or similar).
• Familiarity with networking fundamentals (firewalls, load balancing, DNS)

Bonus points if you have:

• ZFS administration experience.
• LXC or container-based hosting experience.
• Elasticsearch / Elastic Stack experience.
• Kubernetes exposure or hands-on experience.
• Advanced WordPress performance troubleshooting.
• Hands-on experience with Oracle Cloud or Google Cloud

Our Benefits:

• Annual remote expense budget.
• Flexible PTO.
• Paid parental leave.
• Annual professional development budget: available after one year with Kinsta.
• Sabbatical: available after three years with Kinsta (and every three years thereafter).
• Location-specific healthcare benefits (including vision and dental) for employees hired in the USA, UK, and Hungary.
• Pension plan for employees hired in the UK, and 401k contributions for employees hired in the USA