IT Systems Engineer

Team Description:

For Neuralink's Information Technology team, the corporate environment is production. It is where our groundbreaking research and development takes place and hosts our assembly lines, neural recording training and processing, and many other functions. The team builds critical systems and processes that safely accelerate our progress along the company's critical path.

Job Description and Responsibilities:

The IT Systems Engineer Lead defines and drives the technical vision for IT Systems Engineering team at Neuralink. They set the bar for technical excellence, customer service, and engineering rigor while owning the team’s roadmap, priorities, and day-to-day execution. They guide work across the full environment stack, from the physical hardware the company runs on to the custom tooling that powers neural recordings and the scalable cloud services that support our most critical functions.

Neuralink has a diverse user base, from highly technically proficient engineers to non-technical scientists and doctors. Still, they all need solid systems, rugged networking, and bullet-proof software to do their jobs. The IT Systems Engineer Lead excels by spotting high-leverage opportunities, driving strategic initiatives, mentoring and growing their team, and collaborating across the company to deliver outsized impact. The job responsibilities will include:

• Leading, mentoring, and developing a team of IT Systems Engineers, including technical guidance, performance management, career development, and hiring
• Defining and executing the IT systems roadmap in partnership and leadership and cross-functional stakeholders
• Identifying, building, and deploying open-source, off-the-shelf, or custom-built systems and policies that meet our demanding requirements
• Owning the monitoring, maintaining, and optimizing the performance and security of all IT systems, including servers, networks, cloud infrastructure, and applications
• Acting as the senior escalation point and technical authority for the most complex issues while participating in tier-1 rotation and providing tier-2/3 expertise
• Ensuring compliance with data-protection regulations and internal security policies through proactive controls, regular audits, and continuous improvement
• Creating and maintaining world-class documentation for systems, processes, and procedures to support knowledge sharing, onboarding, and business continuity
• Partnering closely with diverse teams (Manufacturing, Animal Care, Research, etc.) to design and optimize business processes and technology solutions

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of progressive systems engineering and infrastructure leadership experience (prior people-management or technical-lead experience strongly preferred)
• Strong background in team leadership, including making informed hiring and termination decisions
• Expert-level systems administration across Linux, macOS, and/or Windows environments
• Deep mastery of networking protocols and technologies (TCP/IP, UDP, ARP, DNS, DHCP, PXE, VPCs, IPsec VPNs, WireGuard, IAM policies, etc.)
• Hands-on expertise procuring, deploying, and maintaining physical and virtual compute infrastructure at scale
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical teams, mentor engineers, and drive results in a fast-paced environment
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills and comfort working with both highly technical and non-technical partners
• Empathetic, patient, and clear communicator who can translate complex technical concepts for any audience
• Proven track record of solving immediate fires while simultaneously designing and implementing long-term, scalable solutions
• Willingness to travel periodically (estimated 10–20%), including monthly or quarterly visits to other office locations

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience designing and scaling large-scale, high-availability data storage and backup solutions
• Strong scripting/automation skills in at least one of POSIX sh, Bash, Python, or similar (used for asset management, provisioning, compliance, etc.)
• Deep knowledge of modern security architecture and the ability to define and enforce company-wide security policies and best practices
• Working knowledge of major cryptographic protocols and authentication frameworks (TLS, X.509, 802.1X, U2F, SAML, WebAuthn, etc.)
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and modern cloud-native tooling (Terraform, Docker, Packer, Ansible, Cloud-Init, Git, Helm, GitLab CI, etc.)
• Prior administration of enterprise SaaS platforms (Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, Slack, etc.)
• Strong experience in AV (Audio-Visual) systems