About Charles River Associates

Charles River Associates is a leading global consulting firm that provides economic, financial, and business management expertise to major law firms, corporations and governments around the world. CRA advises clients on economic and financial matters pertaining to litigation and regulatory proceedings, and guides corporations through critical business strategy and performance-related issues. Since 1965, clients have engaged CRA for its combination of industry experience and rigorous, fact-based analysis that provide clients with clear, implementable solutions to complex business concerns.

Position Overview

The Information Technology (ITS) team at CRA is currently a Global team of 40 professionals dedicated to enhancing, maintaining, and developing the firm's technology infrastructure and security. The team is comprised of four functions: Service Delivery & Telecom, Enterprise Application Solutions, Infrastructure, Networking and Cloud Services and Security. Information Technology staff are based in the Boston, Chicago, London, Munich, New York, Oakland, and Washington, DC offices. Mainly a Microsoft house, CRA is looking to maximize the performance of our on-premise systems and hybrid infrastructure, meaning experience with cloud technologies is essential for this role.

The Systems Engineer designs, builds, and supports CRA’s core infrastructure across on-premises and public cloud environments. This role focuses on Dell compute, Everpure storage, Windows Server, and VMware vSphere, and on extending and integrating services into public cloud. The Systems Engineer partners closely with network, security, application, and service delivery teams to keep systems reliable, secure, well-documented, and current, and supports disaster recovery readiness as part of broader operational resilience. The Systems Engineer is a broad and varied role which provides a fantastic opportunity to develop existing skillsets and get hands-on experience with new technologies in a fast-paced production environment. Typical Systems Engineer responsibilities include:

Dell Compute: Deploy, configure, and maintain Dell PowerEdge servers across their lifecycle, including firmware, BIOS, and driver updates through iDRAC and OpenManage, hardware health monitoring, and vendor support coordination.
Everpure Storage: Administer Everpure storage arrays, including volume and host provisioning, capacity and performance management, snapshot policies, replication, and upgrades.
Windows Server: Build, configure, patch, and harden Windows Server systems; support Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, Group Policy, and file services; automate routine tasks with PowerShell.
VMware vSphere: Manage vCenter, ESXi hosts, clusters, HA/DRS, templates, and the virtual machine lifecycle; plan capacity and perform host upgrades and patching.
Public Cloud: Deploy and support workloads in public cloud (Azure preferred), including compute, storage, networking, and identity integration, applying governance, security, and cost-management best practices across the hybrid environment.
Monitoring & Operations: Maintain monitoring, alerting, and dashboards for infrastructure platforms; participate in incident response and root cause analysis; document and standardize runbooks and operational procedures.
Disaster Recovery Support: Support DR readiness for infrastructure services by maintaining recovery runbooks and dependency information and participating in periodic tabletop and technical recovery tests.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work day-to-day with infrastructure, network, cloud, security, and application teams to improve operational excellence and shared ownership of production outcomes.
On-call rotation as an escalation during service outages.
Own the evaluation of challenges from an engineering perspective.

Desired Qualifications

Hands-on experience deploying and maintaining Dell PowerEdge servers, including iDRAC, OpenManage, and firmware lifecycle management.
Experience administering Everpure (or comparable enterprise all-flash) storage, including provisioning, snapshots, replication, and performance troubleshooting