Senior Virtualization Engineer - Fort Gordon, GA - TS/SCI clearance

PGTEK•Fort Gordon, GA

12d•$145,000 - $170,000•Onsite

About The Position

The customer is migrating its vSphere 8 estate to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1. This role requires a mid-level engineer to assist in designing the target environment, building it in a lab, and executing the upgrade across classified enclaves. The engineer will report to a lead architect and be responsible for specific design artifacts and deployment workstreams. A significant portion of the job involves collaboration with network, storage, and cybersecurity teams, as well as presenting design choices to government stakeholders. The environment is RMF-accredited, meaning design decisions must be defensible as control statements.

Requirements

Active, in-scope TS/SCI clearance at time of hire.
U.S. citizenship.
Ability to work on-site in a SCIF.
Current Security+ CE certification, meeting the DoD 8140 IAT Level II baseline, maintained throughout employment.
Current VCP certification (VCP-VCF Administrator or Architect preferred; legacy-track VCP acceptable at hire if VCF-track exam is passed within six months).
Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, or engineering, plus 4 to 7 years in enterprise virtualization, or four additional years of relevant experience in lieu of a degree.
Experience designing and building VCF instances.
VCF 9.x experience, or VCF 5.x with current knowledge of the 9.x architecture (VCF Installer, VCF Operations, VCF Automation, and SDDC Manager/Aria integration).
At least one multi-cluster vSphere major-version upgrade executed in change-controlled production.
Working depth across ESX, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, vLCM, HA, DRS, vMotion.
Experience in an RMF-accredited DoD or IC environment applying STIGs and closing vulnerabilities.
Proficiency in PowerCLI.
Sufficient knowledge of server hardware, SAN, and data center networking to troubleshoot beyond one's own layer.
Technical writing skills for producing government-approved documentation.

Nice To Haves

Ansible or Terraform experience.

Responsibilities

Design architecture artifacts including logical and physical designs, bill of materials, sizing and capacity models, and a design decision register with justification and risk, ensuring traceability to stated requirements.
Define management and VI workload domain layout, availability zones, and cluster topology aligned with mission availability requirements.
Develop vSAN ESA storage policies, fault domains, and capacity strategy, assessing the value of NVMe memory tiering on existing hardware.
Configure NSX transport zones, edge clusters, T0/T1 routing, and segmentation policy to match enclave boundaries.
Manage identity and PKI, including Active Directory over LDAPS, CAC authentication, VMCA versus enterprise CA, and least-privilege roles.
Establish a lifecycle approach using vLCM image-based clusters, vSphere Configuration Profiles for desired-state enforcement, and the VCF depot model for offline patching.
Deploy VCF 9.1 using the VCF Installer, supporting both greenfield deployments and conversion of existing vSphere 8.0 U3+ vCenter instances.
Build and maintain the lab environment for rehearsing all production changes.
Write step-level runbooks detailing prerequisites, validation gates, decision points, rollback criteria, and rollback procedures.
Execute production upgrades of vCenter, ESX hosts, vSAN, and NSX in sequence, and manage VM hardware and Tools remediation.
Perform pre- and post-upgrade validation, including health checks, HCL and firmware verification, backup verification, performance baselines, and functional testing of mission workloads.
Coordinate workload migration and outage windows with application owners.
Troubleshoot upgrade failures and performance regressions, including Broadcom case management and log bundle collection.
Apply and validate DISA STIGs for ESX, vCenter, NSX, and guest operating systems, documenting deviations and justifications for government review.
Remediate ACAS and Nessus findings, and respond to IAVA notices within program timelines.
Author technical content for security control implementation statements and eMASS artifacts.
Implement encryption, secure boot, and TPM attestation where hardware supports it.
Create as-built documentation, diagrams, and SOPs, and conduct knowledge transfer to government operators.
Develop automation using PowerCLI and VCF/vSphere REST APIs, and Ansible or Terraform where applicable.
Design and test backup and disaster recovery solutions for the virtualization layer.
Participate in CCB and technical exchange meetings, and respond to RFIs.