Virtualization / Automation Engineer (Journeyman)

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.