Virtualization / Automation Engineer (Journeyman)

Key Tasks & Responsibilities

• Configure, administer, and maintain virtualization clusters, including vSphere HA, DRS, resource pools, hosts, datastores, and distributed switches, and manage ESXi and vCenter patching, upgrades, and certificates.
• Monitor platform capacity, availability, performance, and compliance, and recommend scaling, balancing, or remediation actions.
• Configure and support vSAN clusters, storage policies, and fault domains, and troubleshoot vSAN performance, resynchronization, and policy-compliance issues.
• Configure and support NSX segments, transport zones, gateways, routing, and distributed security controls, coordinating changes with network and cybersecurity teams.
• Administer SRM protection groups and recovery plans, execute and document failover and failback tests, and support quarterly COOP exercises and continuity events.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure automation using Terraform, Ansible, PowerCLI, or APIs, with version control, peer review, testing, rollback, secrets protection, and drift detection.
• Coordinate with workload owners on resource requirements, placement, templates, and snapshots, preserving the division between platform and workload ownership.
• Provide advanced engineering support for cross-platform incidents, isolate platform faults during outages, and collect evidence for root-cause analysis and implement corrective actions.
• Maintain platform configuration backups, apply DISA STIGs and security baselines, and support RMF evidence, vulnerability remediation, and vendor-advisory reviews.
• Support technology refreshes and modernization; contribute to capacity, lifecycle, and modernization assessments.
• Support DISA-hosting transitions through discovery, dependency documentation, readiness assessment, test and rollback plans, cutover, and post-migration stabilization.
• Maintain architecture diagrams, as-built documentation, SOPs, and recovery procedures, and provide platform metrics and modernization status for program reporting.

Education & Experience

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience where permitted by the labor category.
• Minimum of six (6) years of relevant experience in virtualization, systems engineering, data-center infrastructure, platform engineering, or infrastructure automation.
• Hands-on experience with VMware vSphere, ESXi, and vCenter and with vSAN, NSX, SRM, or comparable software-defined storage, network-virtualization, and disaster-recovery technologies.
• Experience developing or maintaining infrastructure-automation solutions and troubleshooting issues across compute, storage, network, virtualization, and automation layers.
• Knowledge of high availability, disaster recovery, backup and restoration, capacity management, and lifecycle practices.
• Strong written, verbal, analytical, and technical problem-solving skills.

Preferred:

• Formal Terraform and Ansible training.
• Experience with VMware Cloud Foundation or VMware Aria, and PowerCLI, PowerShell, Python, or REST APIs.
• Experience supporting federal or DoD virtualization environments and migrations to DISA enterprise-hosting platforms.
• Experience with DISA STIGs, RMF controls, vulnerability remediation, and configuration compliance.
• Experience developing Infrastructure as Code within CI/CD and Git workflows with automated testing and code scanning.

Certifications

• Required: None.
• Preferred: VMware Certified Professional, HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate, Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation, ITIL 4 Foundation, or relevant cloud, security, storage, or network certification.

Security Clearance

• Active Secret clearance or higher is required.

Other (Travel, Work Environment, DoD 8570 Requirements, Administrative Notes, etc.)

Work Environment / Travel:

• Remote position; Chicago, IL–area candidates preferred.
• Occasional on-site support, after-hours maintenance, disaster-recovery exercises, incident response, and travel may be required.

Administrative Notes:

Period of Performance: March 1, 2027 – February 28, 2033

Contract Start Date: March 1, 2027

Note: By applying to this position, the candidate acknowledges and consents to having their resume included in an active competitive Government contract bid.