Data Storage Engineer

Job Description

Position Summary

Base-2 Solutions is seeking a Data Storage Engineer to support the National Digital Exploitation & OSINT Center (NDOC) at the Intelligence Community Campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The role provides storage engineering, systems administration, architecture, lifecycle planning, operations, and optimization across on-premises and cloud environments. The engineer will support enterprise storage availability, performance, capacity, resilience, disaster recovery, documentation, and continuous improvement initiatives.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Design and engineer scalable enterprise storage architectures supporting performance, resiliency, high availability, and mission growth requirements across on-premises and cloud environments.
• Develop logical and physical storage architectures, reference designs, and engineering roadmaps aligned with mission requirements and future capacity demands.
• Perform systems design and engineering analysis for storage modernization initiatives, including solution trade studies, technology evaluations, and engineering recommendations.
• Engineer lifecycle replacement strategies for enterprise storage infrastructure while balancing risk, obsolescence, cost, and operational continuity.
• Develop and maintain engineering artifacts, including architecture diagrams, low-level designs, interface documentation, data flow mappings, and implementation plans.
• Apply systems engineering principles to storage integration, interoperability, performance optimization, and infrastructure resilience.
• Analyze system dependencies, failure modes, and technical risks, and develop mitigation strategies to improve reliability and supportability.
• Engineer and optimize storage solutions for multi-petabyte environments supporting virtualization, GPU- and compute-intensive workloads, and mission-critical applications.
• Provide engineering support for performance modeling, capacity forecasting, and lifecycle planning using operational metrics and trend analysis.
• Contribute to disaster recovery architecture, data protection engineering, and continuity solution design for enterprise storage services.
• Install, configure, and administer enterprise storage systems from multiple vendors, including Dell EMC and Quantum.
• Install, configure, and administer Rubrik server and client software; schedule and monitor backup policies; and generate backup status reports.
• Administer Cisco Brocade Fibre Channel switch fabrics, configure single-initiator zone sets, and monitor switch utilization and performance.
• Create and secure SMB file shares.
• Coordinate with server administrators to create, secure, and mount NFS exports.
• Develop and implement disaster recovery and Continuity of Operations plans in accordance with customer requirements.
• Install, configure, maintain, and administer Linux and Windows servers supporting storage operations, including Rubrik, Media, DSM, and Master servers.
• Build capacity management dashboards that improve visibility into enterprise storage use, health, and resilience and support infrastructure lifecycle replacement planning.
• Configure Rubrik policies and troubleshoot and resolve backup job failures.
• Coordinate with vCenter administrators to provision Storage Area Network resources to VMware ESX cluster datastores.
• Configure and manage volume snapshots and assist customers with point-in-time file restores.
• Schedule and monitor volume replication for disaster recovery.
• Monitor the health and availability of infrastructure applications and systems.
• Work with vendors to troubleshoot and resolve hardware and software failures.
• Coordinate with Change Management to deconflict and schedule hardware maintenance activities, system and firmware updates, and other configuration changes.
• Execute system changes during scheduled maintenance windows.
• Monitor and evaluate system performance and capacity trends.
• Resolve Tier 2 and Tier 3 service requests.
• Identify opportunities to automate operations and develop automated solutions using Dell and NetApp system APIs.
• Seek opportunities for continuous improvement to support effective and efficient operations.
• Work with cloud storage solutions as needed for cloud applications.
• Work independently with minimal supervision.
• Mentor junior team members.

Required Qualifications

• Relevant data storage engineering and administration experience meeting an applicable education and experience pathway in the equivalency section.
• Extensive experience managing and administering Veritas Rubrik.
• Experience with scripting technologies such as PowerShell.
• Working knowledge of Unix- or Linux-based operating systems.
• Working knowledge of Distributed File System (DFS).
• Excellent communication skills.
• Ability to mentor junior team members.
• Ability to complete complex projects with minimal direction.
• Experience working independently to support a 24/7/365 customer environment.
• Experience contributing to deliverables and meeting performance metrics.
• Experience coordinating with senior management and customers.
• Candidate must, at a minimum, meet DoD 8570.11 IAT Level II certification requirements.
• Extensive experience administering enterprise-level data storage systems.
• SAN administration, including provisioning LUNs, managing Fibre Channel zoning, and mapping storage to servers.
• NAS administration, including NFS and SMB file sharing.
• Integration with VMware ESX Server.
• Knowledge of data migration strategies.
• Knowledge of snapshots.
• Knowledge of volume replication.
• Experience managing file and share permissions in an Active Directory environment.
• Knowledge of storage monitoring and performance tuning.
• Understanding of cloud storage management.
• US Citizenship is required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Dell Storage Center, Dell Compellent, and Data Domain.
• Familiarity with model-based or traditional systems engineering disciplines, architecture frameworks, and engineering documentation practices.
• Experience with disaster recovery and COOP storage backup and recovery within and across data centers and the cloud.
• Ability to analyze cloud migration approaches to support customer decision-making for effective and efficient cloud migrations.
• Experience managing Distributed File System (DFS) namespaces.

Required Education and Experience Equivalency

• Bachelor's degree with 8 years of relevant experience.
• Master's degree with 6 years of relevant experience.
• Associate's degree with 12 years of related experience.
• High School Diploma with 14 years of related experience.

Required Certifications

• Candidate must, at a minimum, meet DoD 8570.11 IAT Level II certification requirements (currently Security+ CE, CCNA-Security, GSEC, or SSCP along with an appropriate computing environment (CE) certification).

Required Security Clearance

• Active Top Secret/SCI

Pay & Benefit Highlights

Compensation

• Competitive fixed salary or hourly pay (based on experience, skills, location, and internal equity).
• Employee referral bonuses up to $10,000 per hired referral.
• Additional bonus opportunities for exceptional performance and contributions to business development and company growth (role-dependent).

Health

• 100% company-paid medical premiums for employees and eligible dependents.
• Choose from multiple plan options with CareFirst, Kaiser, and UnitedHealthcare, including PPO, POS, HMO, and HSA-compatible plans.
• 100% company-paid dental premiums for employees and eligible dependents.
• 100% company-paid vision premiums for employees and eligible dependents.

Income Protection

• 100% company-paid premiums for short-term disability.
• 100% company-paid premiums for long-term disability.
• 100% company-paid premiums for accidental death & dismemberment (AD&D).
• 100% company-paid premiums for life insurance up to $200,000.

Retirement

• 401(k) with immediate vesting: 4% company match plus a 4% non-elective company contribution (8% total).
• 401(k) pre-tax and Roth options.

Leave

• Up to 20 days of flexible paid time off (PTO).
• 11 paid floating holidays.

Work-Life Balance

• Flexible work schedules, including flex time and compressed work periods (contract and project-dependent).

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