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