Senior IT Engineer

The Senior IT Engineer is the senior generalist and technical lead for general IT - broad across the whole internal IT surface with genuine depth in several areas, who sets the standards, runbooks, and paved roads the generalist practice runs to, owns the hardest cross-domain problems, and makes the technical calls for day-to-day IT operations. Where an IT Engineer covers the surface hands-on and escalates what exceeds it, the senior decides how the generalist surface is run: the endpoint-fleet and SaaS-estate standards, the triage and escalation-tier model, the onboarding / offboarding operating model, and - the heart of the seat - the runbook library and self-service system that let a whole bench of IT Engineers and helpdesk technicians hold the surface without every hard thing routing to one person. This is a senior individual-contributor seat reporting to an IT Manager or Head of IT, with technical-decision ownership of general IT operations, a mentoring relationship to the IT Engineers and the helpdesk, and a partnership - not an ownership - relationship to the deep specialists. It is deliberately the breadth counterpart to the Senior IT Systems Engineer's depth: the senior generalist owns the wide general-IT surface and defers deep systems architecture (virtualization, identity engineering, backup / DR design) to the systems track, exactly as the base IT Engineer defers the deep build to the base IT Systems Engineer. Performance is visible in whether the whole IT surface stays reliable as the company grows, whether the standards and self-service actually get adopted so volume shrinks, and whether the engineers and technicians mentored operate at a higher bar. What separates great from average at this altitude is turning a personal talent for fixing anything into a system for keeping the surface fixed without you: a runbook library and self-service that retire whole classes of ticket, a fleet and SaaS operating standard the generalists build to so the estate stays coherent, an owned mastery of the cross-domain problem no single specialist can see end to end, and a mentored bench that levels up. A mediocre senior generalist becomes the indispensable hero every escalation funnels to - a single point of failure at a higher salary who is too busy firefighting to ever get ahead of the volume, and who quietly annexes deep systems work they cannot sustain. A great one is the person who makes the whole general-IT practice better than the sum of its people, holds the line on what belongs to the systems specialists, and is measured by a surface that runs well when they are on vacation.