Virtualization / Automation Engineer (Senior)

The role owns the hypervisor and SDDC platform layers across production, development, test, COOP, disaster-recovery, and hybrid-hosting environments; guest operating systems, applications, databases, and cloud workloads remain with their respective teams. The engineer also supports the transition of applicable services to centralized DISA-hosting platforms through discovery, migration planning, migration support, validation, and stabilization., * Serve as senior engineering owner for the SDDC platform, establishing architecture, configuration standards, operational procedures, and engineering roadmaps.

• Build, configure, and optimize 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.
• Engineer vSAN clusters, storage policies, and fault domains, and troubleshoot vSAN performance, resynchronization, and policy-compliance issues.
• Engineer NSX segments, transport zones, gateways, routing, and distributed security controls, coordinating changes with network and cybersecurity teams.
• Administer SRM protection groups and recovery plans, develop and maintain automated failover and failback procedures, and support quarterly COOP exercises and continuity events.
• Design and implement 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 Tier 4 engineering support for cross-platform incidents, isolate platform faults during outages, and conduct root-cause analyses and develop 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; develop platform roadmaps, technical options, and rough-order cost estimates.
• Support DISA-hosting transitions through discovery, dependency documentation, readiness assessment, migration waves, 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.

• 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 eight (8) 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 complex 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., * Preferred: VMware Certified Professional, VMware Certified Advanced Professional, HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate, Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation, ITIL 4 Foundation, or relevant cloud, security, storage, or network certification.