Manager, Systems Engineering (Hybrid)

About Rewards Network For 41 years, Rewards Network has been helping restaurants grow revenue, increase traffic, and boost customer engagement through innovative financial, marketing services, and premier dining rewards programs. By offering unique card-linked offers, we introduce diners to fantastic restaurant experiences, leveraging advanced technology and data analytics to deliver value to restaurants, diners, and our strategic partners' loyalty programs. Our Culture At Rewards Network, you'll be part of a driven and diverse team that excels in collaboration, issue resolution, and taking ownership of both personal growth and the company's success. We take pride in partnering with the world's most powerful loyalty programs to drive full-price paying customers to local restaurants through marketing services and flexible funding options. Our engaging and rewarding environment is designed to help you gain your full potential. Job Overview The Manager, Network & Systems Engineering is a player-coach role responsible for the technical leadership and operational health of Rewards Network’s network and systems infrastructure. This position combines direct people management of a small, senior engineering team with meaningful hands-on technical contribution, ensuring both day-to-day stability and longer-term infrastructure modernization. The role reports to the Senior Manager, Infrastructure & Site Reliability Engineering and collaborates closely with Security, SRE, DBA, and product engineering teams. This is a hybrid position that requires in office presence 3 days a week (Tuesday-Thursday) in Chicago. What you’ll bring to the table: (Responsibilities) • Lead, develop, and support a team of network and systems engineers; manage performance, career growth, and day-to-day prioritization while remaining technically engaged alongside the team. • Architect, maintain, and continuously improve on-premises network infrastructure including routing, switching, firewalls, and physical datacenter topology. • Own the health and reliability of Windows and Linux server environments, including patching cadence, configuration management, and OS lifecycle planning. • Drive infrastructure modernization initiatives such as datacenter consolidation, network stabilization, and cloud expansion in partnership with the broader engineering organization. • Lead or contribute to database platform migrations and integrations (MS SQL to PostgreSQL), partnering with DBAs and application teams on planning and execution. • Collaborate with the AWS-focused SRE team to extend and mature the organization’s cloud infrastructure, with emphasis on networking, security boundaries, and hybrid connectivity. • Evaluate infrastructure hardware and software options with a cost-conscious, ROI-driven approach; partner with engineering leadership on procurement decisions and vendor selection. • Establish and maintain runbooks, change control practices, and technical documentation to support reliable operations and audit/compliance requirements. • Participate in incident response as an escalation point for network and systems issues; conduct root cause analysis and drive durable remediation. • Manage and evolve virtualization and containerization platforms across on-premises and cloud environments, ensuring efficient resource utilization and alignment with broader infrastructure strategy. • Contribute to infrastructure roadmap planning by surfacing technical risks, capacity needs, and modernization opportunities to engineering leadership. • Own disaster recovery planning for network and systems infrastructure; define recovery objectives, maintain runbooks, and lead regular DR testing exercises to validate recoverability. Do you have the right mix of ingredients : • 5+ years