Operations Engineering, Senior Advisor

Peraton•Baltimore, MD

22h

About The Position

The Production Operations Lead is accountable for the stability, availability, and recoverability of MARx in production. MARx is the CMS system of record for Medicare Advantage and Part D enrollment, premiums, and plan payments, serving about 53 million beneficiaries and more than 300 Plan Sponsor Organizations and supporting about $68 billion per month in plan payments. The Lead runs day-to-day production operations across the CMS AWS environment; leads incident, problem, disaster recovery, and continuity management; and ensures daily, monthly, and annual operational activities are completed on time. The role also drives automation and process improvements to shift team capacity from operations and maintenance toward enhancements. The Lead works closely with CMS business owners, CMS OIT, MBOSC, CMS help desks and incident response teams, and partner systems including SSA, RRB, HPMS, APPS, and the Common Medicare Environment shared with MEPBS. The position requires hands-on operational leadership, sound judgment under pressure, and clear prioritization to protect payment accuracy, beneficiary coverage, and timely delivery to plans. The Lead advises program leadership and CMS, mentors production support staff, and improves reliability, disaster recovery, and operational efficiency. This position is contingent on contract award. The role includes production monitoring and availability; disaster recovery and continuity; incident, problem, and security event response; operational calendar, batch processing, and file exchanges; release and change management; support desk collaboration and ticket backlog management; security, compliance, and audit operations; cost optimization and operational efficiency; Medicare business operations and data integrity; stakeholder collaboration; program planning; documentation; mentorship; and knowledge sharing. The position supports production operations in a CMS AWS environment and has a target salary range of $176,000–$282,000. Eligible employees may receive benefits including medical, dental, vision, life, health savings account, short- and long-term disability, EAP, parental leave, 401(k), PTO, and company-paid holidays.

Requirements

At least 12 years of professional experience with a BS/BA, 10 years with an MS/MA, or 7 years with a Ph.D.
Experience leading production operations for a large, mission-critical system in AWS, including monitoring, incident response, and high-availability operations.
Demonstrated experience leading production support teams and coordinating incident response across multiple technical teams and external partners.
Experience owning disaster recovery and continuity, including DR playbooks, RTO/RPO, contingency plan testing, and failover/failback execution.
Experience with release and change management in a SAFe/Agile environment with CI/CD pipelines.
Experience supporting federal government systems that process personally identifiable information and financial transactions.
Ability to obtain and maintain the CMS background investigation and HSPD-12 PIV credential.
Experience operating batch processing and file-based data exchanges with external partners on fixed processing calendars.
Working knowledge of federal security operations, including FISMA, NIST SP 800-53, incident reporting, vulnerability remediation, POA&M management, and ATO support.
Hands-on knowledge of AWS operations, including compute, containers, serverless, databases, networking, monitoring, and security services.
Experience with observability tooling, centralized logging, alerting, and on-call management.
Experience with production database operations, including availability, backup, recovery, and data integrity.
Understanding of CMS and Medicare program operations and how production issues affect beneficiaries, plans, and payments.

Nice To Haves

Experience with CMS systems and processes, especially Medicare Advantage and Part D enrollment, premium, and payment operations, and the New Year Preparation cycle.
Hands-on experience with MARx operations tools, including Splunk and Splunk On-Call, Datadog, CloudWatch, AWS Security Hub and GuardDuty, and Amazon QuickSight.
Familiarity with Aurora MySQL and PostgreSQL, ECS Fargate, Lambda, AWS Batch, SQS/SNS, and CMS Enterprise File Transfer.
Industry certification such as AWS Certified SysOps Administrator or DevOps Engineer, ITIL 4, or equivalent.
Experience leading SRE-style automation that measurably reduced operational workload.
Direct experience with MARx production operations, including its batch schedule, interfaces, and operational calendar.
Familiarity with CMS governance, including the Target Life Cycle, Technical Reference Architecture, Acceptable Risk Safeguards, and MEPS Change Control Board process.
Experience with HHS/CMS incident and breach response procedures, including breach reporting under OMB M-17-12.
Experience with ServiceNow incident and case workflows.
Experience applying SI-enabled monitoring or automation, such as anomaly detection, in a regulated environment.

Responsibilities

Lead real-time production monitoring of MARx jobs, system health, cost and usage, and security events using CMS-approved tools; identify and resolve anomalies and errors before they affect plans or beneficiaries.
Manage production availability and response-time performance against the 99.9% target, and report performance against that target.
Maintain cloud scalability and code portability with the DevOps Lead and Architectural Lead, and apply the AWS Well-Architected Framework to production operations.
Plan capacity for periodic peak processing loads, including monthly payment processing, the Annual Enrollment Period, and New Year Preparation.
Own the MARx Disaster Recovery Playbook, including roles, escalation, testing guidelines, notifications, infrastructure and network details, and failover and failback procedures.
Meet recovery time and recovery point objectives, lead annual Contingency Plan tabletop tests and CMS-requested DR exercises, and track corrective actions.
Lead production incident response from detection through recovery, coordinating scrum teams, DevOps and Security Leads, and partner systems.
Ensure suspected or confirmed security and privacy incidents and breaches are reported to the CMS Incident Response Team, COR, and CO within one hour; respond to HHS CSIRC and CMS IRT alerts and indicators of compromise within 24 hours.
Support the Incident and Breach Response Plan; provide requested logs, images, and event data; and produce post-incident reports covering impact, threat vector, information affected, lessons learned, and mitigation.
Lead root cause analyses for production defects and track preventive actions to closure; maintain the downtime communications playbook and ensure timely, accurate notices about releases, maintenance, outages, and downtime.
Direct daily, monthly, quarterly, and annual MARx operations, including monthly payment file transmission to APPS and inbound and outbound data exchanges with MAOs, SSA, RRB, and internal partners.
Oversee the Split and Push file transmission service, File Mover processes, partner exchanges, premium withhold and premium reduction requests, and related operational schedules.
Lead readiness for New Year Preparation, the Beneficiary Rate Increase, and the Annual Enrollment Period; coordinate semiannual lower-environment data refreshes and data archival in line with CMS retention requirements.
Proactively identify, test, and implement fixes for information exchange issues to minimize impacts on partners.
Govern production deployments under the twice-weekly release cadence, including production readiness reviews, post-implementation reviews, and rollback readiness; ensure production changes follow the CMS Target Life Cycle and MEPS Change Control Board process.
Serve as the operations point of contact for MBOSC, provide SME support on urgent tickets, lead working sessions, deliver time-sensitive data fixes, and keep ticket status visible across MARx, MBOSC, and CMS.
Maintain help desk scripts with MAPD, CMS IT, and other CMS help desks; triage aging transition-in tickets; draft and execute a backlog reduction plan; and work toward CMS's goal of no open tickets more than one year old by the beginning of 2029.
Ensure production vulnerabilities and findings are remediated within HHS POA&M timelines or tracked in the POA&M; support the MARx Authority to Operate, CMS Acceptable Risk Safeguards controls, penetration testing, vulnerability scans, and mandated audits.
Manage resource usage to limit CMS costs, identify and implement operational automation, participate in CMS innovation efforts, and evaluate appropriate SI and machine-learning applications in production operations.
Maintain a working understanding of the MARx business functions supported by production and their effects on beneficiaries, plans, and payments.
Oversee production database availability, backup, and recovery for MARx data stores, and promote data integrity and practices that prevent corruption and data cleanup incidents.
Work with CMS business owners and OIT on operational priorities, production issues, and changes; coordinate with partner and upstream system teams; and explain risks, incidents, and trade-offs to technical and nontechnical audiences.
Participate in MEPS Program Increment Planning and follow the MEPS iteration schedule; plan operations capacity alongside enhancement work; advise the Program Manager on unplanned-work priorities; report PI plan deviations to CMS OIT; and contribute to risk and issue management and quarterly QASP self-assessments.
Maintain current operations documentation, including SOPs, DFDs, DFVDs, PRRs, and PIRs; mentor production support analysts and engineers; share operational knowledge across scrum teams; and contribute to MARx training and CMS staff training.