Virtualization / Automation Engineer (Journeyman)

Overview

DecisionPoint seeks a Virtualization / Automation Engineer to operate, maintain, automate, and improve the virtualization and Software-Defined Data Center platforms supporting the USMEPCOM ENLIST program. This position supports VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager, and associated infrastructure-automation capabilities.

The Virtualization / Automation Engineer maintains secure, available, scalable, and recoverable platform services across production, development, testing, COOP, disaster-recovery, and hybrid-hosting environments. The engineer develops and maintains Infrastructure as Code and configuration-automation solutions that improve operational consistency, deployment speed, security, compliance, and recoverability.

This role is focused on the virtualization platform and its supporting automation. Routine ownership of guest operating systems, applications, databases, and cloud workloads remains with the appropriate system, application, database, and cloud teams. The engineer supports those teams by delivering and maintaining the underlying compute, storage, network-virtualization, and recovery capabilities their workloads consume.

The position also supports the transition of applicable infrastructure and services from on-premises environments to centralized DISA-hosting platforms through discovery, documentation, platform preparation, migration support, technical validation, and post-transition stabilization.

This position is remote, with Chicago-area candidates preferred. Occasional on-site support, after-hours maintenance, incident response, and travel may be required.

Note: By applying to this position, you acknowledge and consent to having your resume included in an active competitive government contract bid.

Duties & Responsibilities

The Virtualization / Automation Engineer will:

• Configure, administer, maintain, troubleshoot, and optimize enterprise hypervisor and Software-Defined Data Center platforms.

• Support VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager, and associated platform-management capabilities.

• Maintain virtualization clusters supporting production, development, testing, COOP, and disaster-recovery environments.

• Configure and support vSphere High Availability, Distributed Resource Scheduler, resource pools, clusters, hosts, datastores, distributed switches, and related platform services.

• Support ESXi host and vCenter installation, configuration, patching, upgrades, certificate maintenance, and lifecycle activities.

• Monitor platform capacity, availability, performance, utilization, health, and configuration compliance.

• Analyze processor, memory, storage, network, and cluster utilization and recommend corrective or capacity actions.

• Configure and support vSAN clusters, disk groups, storage policies, capacity controls, fault domains, and health monitoring.

• Troubleshoot vSAN capacity, performance, availability, resynchronization, hardware, and policy-compliance issues.

• Configure and support approved NSX network-virtualization capabilities, including segments, transport zones, gateways, virtual switching, routing, and distributed security controls.

• Coordinate NSX activities with network, cybersecurity, systems, application, and cloud teams.

• Administer VMware Site Recovery Manager configurations, protection groups, inventory mappings, network mappings, and recovery plans.

• Execute and document approved recovery-plan tests, failover activities, and failback activities.

• Support quarterly COOP exercises, disaster-recovery testing, backup restoration, and actual continuity events.

• Document exercise results, technical deficiencies, corrective actions, and lessons learned.

• Develop and maintain infrastructure automation using Terraform, Ansible, PowerCLI, APIs, or comparable tools.

• Create reusable modules, playbooks, scripts, templates, and workflows for provisioning, configuration, validation, patching, compliance, and recovery.

• Maintain automation code in approved version-control repositories.

• Follow established peer-review, testing, approval, release, rollback, and documentation procedures for automation changes.

• Implement appropriate logging, error handling, secrets protection, state management, and validation within automation solutions.

• Automate repetitive administrative and configuration activities when authorized.

• Support automated configuration-baseline checks and identify drift from approved platform standards.

• Support infrastructure provisioning while preserving the division between platform ownership and guest operating-system, application, database, and workload ownership.

• Coordinate with system administrators and workload owners regarding resource requirements, placement, templates, snapshots, virtual hardware, and platform dependencies.

• Coordinate with storage, network, cloud, application, database, and cybersecurity teams to troubleshoot cross-platform incidents.

• Provide advanced engineering support for virtualization, software-defined storage, network virtualization, automation, and recovery issues.

• Support outage response by isolating platform failures, restoring services, implementing approved workarounds, and providing technical status updates.

• Collect platform logs, events, performance information, configuration data, and other evidence needed for root-cause analysis.

• Implement approved corrective and preventive actions resulting from incident and problem reviews.

• Maintain backups of applicable platform configurations and support restoration testing.

• Apply approved platform security baselines, patches, hardening settings, and configuration standards.

• Support compliance with DISA Security Technical Implementation Guides and applicable vulnerability directives.

• Assist with Risk Management Framework control implementation, evidence collection, assessment support, and remediation activities.

• Review vendor notices, vulnerabilities, patches, and lifecycle information for potential platform impact.

• Support technology refreshes and modernization activities involving compute, storage, network virtualization, hyperconverged infrastructure, and SDDC capabilities.

• Assist with assessments of platform capacity, technical debt, security gaps, lifecycle risks, and modernization opportunities.

• Contribute technical information to architecture options, implementation plans, schedules, cost estimates, and engineering recommendations.

• Support the transition of applicable infrastructure and services to centralized DISA-hosting platforms.

• Perform discovery and document existing platform inventories, configurations, interfaces, dependencies, network requirements, storage requirements, and recovery requirements.

• Assist with platform-readiness assessments and coordinate with guest operating-system, application, database, and cloud-workload owners.

• Support migration test plans, implementation procedures, rollback plans, cutover activities, validation, and post-migration stabilization.

• Coordinate with Government stakeholders, DISA representatives, vendors, and technical teams during hosting-transition activities.

• Support integration of SDDC capabilities with cloud, COOP, and on-premises environments.

• Develop and maintain architecture diagrams, as-built documentation, configuration baselines, standard operating procedures, automation documentation, and recovery procedures.

• Follow approved change, release, incident, problem, configuration, security, and quality-management processes.

• Provide platform metrics, capacity information, accomplishments, risks, issues, and modernization status for program reporting.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

Candidates must meet all of the following requirements:

• Active Secret clearance or higher.

• Bachelor’s degree in information technology, computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience where permitted by the applicable labor category.

• Minimum of six years of relevant experience in virtualization, systems engineering, data-center infrastructure, platform engineering, infrastructure automation, or a related technical discipline.

• Hands-on experience administering enterprise hypervisor or Software-Defined Data Center platforms.

• Experience with VMware vSphere, ESXi, and vCenter in an enterprise environment.

• Experience supporting vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager, or comparable software-defined storage, network-virtualization, and disaster-recovery technologies.

• Experience developing, executing, or maintaining infrastructure-automation solutions.

• Experience troubleshooting issues across virtualization, compute, storage, network, and automation layers.

• Knowledge of high availability, disaster recovery, backup, restoration, capacity management, performance monitoring, and infrastructure lifecycle practices.

• Ability to create and maintain technical procedures, automation documentation, configuration records, architecture diagrams, and recovery documentation.

• Ability to support after-hours maintenance, disaster-recovery exercises, and critical incident response when required.

• Strong written, verbal, analytical, and technical problem-solving skills.

Preferred Qualifications

The following qualifications are preferred but are not required:

• Formal Terraform training.

• Formal Ansible training.

• VMware Certified Professional certification.

• HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate certification.

• Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation or comparable automation certification.

• Experience with VMware Cloud Foundation or VMware Aria automation and operations capabilities.

• Experience with PowerCLI, PowerShell, Python, REST APIs, or comparable scripting technologies.

• Experience supporting federal or Department of Defense virtualization environments.

• Experience supporting DISA-hosted services or migrations to DISA enterprise-hosting platforms.

• Experience with DISA Security Technical Implementation Guides, Risk Management Framework controls, vulnerability remediation, and configuration compliance.

• Experience integrating virtualization platforms with hybrid-cloud, COOP, or disaster-recovery environments.

• Experience developing Infrastructure as Code within controlled version-control and CI/CD workflows.

• Experience with Git, automated testing, peer review, code scanning, and configuration-drift detection.

• Experience supporting data-center modernization, platform migrations, or hosting transitions.

• ITIL v4 Foundation certification.

• Relevant cloud, security, storage, or network certification.

Skills and Competencies

• Enterprise virtualization and SDDC administration.

• VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, and SRM.

• Infrastructure as Code and configuration automation.

• High availability, disaster recovery, and COOP support.

• Platform capacity, performance, and lifecycle management.

• Secure configuration and compliance support.

• Complex infrastructure troubleshooting.

• Hybrid-hosting and migration support.

• Technical-documentation development.

• Cross-functional engineering coordination.

• Controlled change and release implementation.

• Strong attention to detail and configuration discipline.

• Ability to distinguish virtualization-platform responsibilities from guest operating-system and workload ownership.

Our Equal Employment Opportunity Policy

• EEO and Affirmative Action Policy: DecisionPoint Corporation is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. It is the policy of DecisionPoint Corporation to provide equal employment opportunity in accordance with all applicable Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action laws, directives and regulations to all employees and qualified applicants without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, disability status, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other protected status under Federal, State or Local laws.
• Pay Transparency Policy: In accordance with Presidential Executive Order 13665, DecisionPoint Corporation will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the contractor's legal duty to furnish information.
• Authorization to Share Resume and Personal Information: By expressing your interest and submitting your resume for this position, you authorize DecisionPoint Corporation to share your resume, as well as personal information included on the resume, with its subsidiaries, affiliates and teaming partners for the purpose of considering you for this position and other available positions requiring comparable skills, education and experience. Should DecisionPoint Corporation. or its affiliates and teaming partners wish to initiate pre-employment discussions, you will be asked to complete an employment application and related employment documents.

Originally posted on Himalayas