Principal Infrastructure Lead - Hoffman Estates, IL

Crystal Clean (CC) is one of the nation's leading privately held companies in the environmental waste services industry. We are seeking highly motivated individuals with a strong work ethic to join our rapidly growing company. Crystal Clean offers competitive compensation, excellent benefits, and opportunities for advancement. We are willing to provide complete training for this opportunity!

The Principal Infrastructure Lead is a senior technical role responsible for designing, implementing, and optimizing enterprise infrastructure platforms across data center, cloud (Azure), network, storage, and computer environments. This role acts as a hands-on technical leader, providing mentorship and direction to infrastructure staff while setting standards for reliability, scalability, and security.

In addition, the Principal Infrastructure Lead will play a forward-looking role in identifying potential use cases for AI and automation - both within IT operations and across business processes. While not directly responsible for building AI solutions, this position ensures the infrastructure and platforms are ready to support AI adoption and surfaces opportunities for efficiency and business enablement.

• Infrastructure Design & Engineering
• Leads the design and implementation of hybrid cloud infrastructure with an emphasis on Azure adoption, automation, and modernization.
• Architects solutions across computing, storage, and network domains, ensuring scalability and disaster recovery readiness.
• Defines standards for monitoring, performance, and configuration management.

AI & Automation Readiness

• Identifies opportunities for AI and automation within IT and business operations (e.g., help desk automation, predictive maintenance, workflow optimization).
• Ensures infrastructure platforms (Azure, M365, data integrations) are capable of supporting AI tools and services.
• Partners with leadership on early AI use case evaluations and proof-of-concepts, while leaving ownership of enterprise AI strategy to future dedicated roles.

Operations Leadership

• Provides Tier-3/architect-level support for escalations from Infrastructure Engineers, Service Desk, and Applications teams.
• Oversees infrastructure lifecycle (capacity planning, patching, hardware refresh, cloud optimization).
• Owns infrastructure documentation, runbooks, and technical standards.
• Automation & Cloud Enablement
• Drives adoption of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for deployments and guardrails.
• Leads automation efforts for provisioning, monitoring, and backup/restore processes.
• Partners with DevOps/CloudOps on pipelines and secure cloud adoption.

Security & Compliance Alignment

• Collaborates with Security team to enforce zero-trust principles, network segmentation, and vulnerability remediation.
• Using consolidated strategy and risk from leadership, identify platforms and configurations that secure systems.
• Ensures infrastructure controls support compliance frameworks where appropriate.

Team Mentorship & Leadership

• Provides technical leadership and mentorship to a small team of infrastructure engineers/administrators.
• Performs as a thought leader in infrastructure design, helping less experienced staff build skills.
• Contributes to workforce planning and skill development but without formal people-management overhead.

Education & Essential Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree and at least 8 years of progressive infrastructure experience OR a High School Diploma / GED and at least 11 years of progressive infrastructure experience
• Experience working with Microsoft Azure, virtualization (vSphere), and Windows/Linux server environments.
• Experience working with networking (routing, switching, firewalls, VPN, SD-WAN).
• Experience (hands-on) with infrastructure automation tools (Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell DSC).
• Knowledge of monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., SolarWinds, Azure Monitor, Splunk).
• Experience in DR/BCP planning and execution.
• Experience in engineering
• At least 2 years in an IT infrastructure leadership role.

Crystal Clean LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Crystal Clean expressly values diversity, equity, and inclusion, and encourages the applications of individuals from diverse backgrounds, so that Crystal Clean reflects the communities and customers that we serve.

The anticipated salary range for this position is $150,000 - $165,000, and includes benefits such as the following:

• Health, Dental and Vision insurance
• Wellness Program
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Life Insurance
• Long-Term Disability
• Employee Assistance Program
• Tuition Reimbursement