Sr. Systems Engineer II (6784)

MetroStar•Washington, DC

8h•$147,000 - $170,000•Onsite

About The Position

As a Sr. Systems Engineer II, you’ll design, secure, automate, and sustain mission-critical infrastructure and container platforms supporting a highly visible federal customer. You’ll leverage your systems engineering, Kubernetes, containerization, DevSecOps, and infrastructure automation experience to improve the reliability, observability, and maintainability of enterprise systems operating in a demanding 24x7 environment.

Requirements

Active Top Secret clearance with SCI eligibility.
6+ years in systems, platform, DevOps, infrastructure engineering, or systems administration.
3+ years of hands-on Kubernetes/container experience.
Strong experience with Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, and Rancher or OpenShift.
Experience supporting on-prem, mission-critical infrastructure.
Hands-on VMware and Linux administration experience.
Infrastructure automation/IaC experience with Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell, Python, or similar.
Experience building or supporting CI/CD pipelines in a DevSecOps environment.
Strong production troubleshooting across compute, storage, networking, OS, and application layers.
Experience with system hardening, vulnerability remediation, security baselines, and secure configurations.
Ability to document technical environments and communicate technical risks/recommendations.
Ability to work primarily onsite in the Washington, D.C. area and support occasional on-call/nonstandard hours.
This position is designated as essential personnel supporting continuity of operations and may require work during government shutdowns, emergencies, or other critical situations.

Responsibilities

Assess and improve the health, performance, security, and reliability of infrastructure and Kubernetes platforms.
Build, configure, and maintain Kubernetes, Rancher, Helm, Docker, VMware, and Linux environments.
Automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and deployments using IaC and CI/CD practices.
Troubleshoot complex issues across containers, compute, storage, networking, and application-hosting environments.
Improve monitoring, logging, alerting, dashboards, and overall platform observability.
Identify technical risks, recurring failures, and technical debt, and develop remediation plans.
Apply security hardening, vulnerability remediation, least privilege, and DevSecOps best practices.
Test, validate, and implement production changes through approved change-management processes.
Collaborate across engineering, cybersecurity, networking, storage, database, and application teams.
Maintain architecture diagrams, runbooks, SOPs, troubleshooting guides, and recovery documentation.
Support knowledge transfer, platform improvements, and occasional after-hours/on-call activities.