active Secret)

Critical Solutions•Norfolk, VA

1d•$85,000 - $110,000•Onsite

About The Position

This role involves working closely with development and operations teams to ensure efficient and reliable software deployments, system monitoring, and overall platform reliability. The Systems Engineer will be responsible for identifying and fixing system bugs, developing features using AI coding tools and script repositories for automation, scaling, testing, and securing cloud infrastructure and pipelines. Key responsibilities include enhancing performance monitoring, identifying and optimizing performance bottlenecks, contributing to the SRE journey through DevOps tools and Infrastructure-as-Code, and developing high-quality pipeline automation workflows. The role also requires developing and executing test strategies for failure scenarios, creating and running performance tests, building automated systems for continuous testing, and collaborating with SREs, developers, and operations teams to define and validate reliability goals. Ensuring new services and features are thoroughly tested before production deployment, and validating monitoring, logging, and alerting mechanisms are crucial. The position also involves tracking Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and independently resolving conflicts between timeline, budget, and scope, while escalating complex issues to senior management.

Requirements

Requires BS degree and 5-10 years of prior relevant experience or Master's with 4-8 years of prior relevant experience.
Currently possess and ability to maintain an active DoD Secret security clearance.
Minimum of DoD 8570.01 IAT Level II Certification required prior to onboarding and must maintain certification while supporting the SMIT Contract.
Must be able to support program execution in classified environments and access SIPRNet from an NMCI location on short notice (local travel).
Experience with automated script design, coding, debugging, and maintenance skills (using bash, python, etc.) preferred.
Experience designing, deploying, and maintaining Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (MECM) environments at enterprise scale.
Proven ability to optimize MECM infrastructure for performance, reliability, and high availability.
Hands-on experience creating and managing MECM device collections, task sequences, applications, packages, and operating system deployment images.
Expertise in automating MECM administrative tasks using PowerShell, APIs, and infrastructure-as-code tooling.
Strong background in Windows endpoint management, including patching strategies, compliance baselines, configuration items, and reporting.
Demonstrated ability to improve endpoint reliability through monitoring, observability tooling, and proactive remediation.
Experience integrating MECM with cloud-based services such as Intune, Azure AD, and Windows Update for Business.
Ability to troubleshoot complex MECM client and server issues using logs, diagnostics, and platform health data.
Experience supporting enterprise-wide operating system deployments and in-place upgrades using MECM automation pipelines.
Knowledge of SQL Server administration relevant to maintaining MECM databases and enabling performance tuning.
Experience contributing to system reliability through continuous improvement, infrastructure monitoring, and configuration drift reduction.
Strong understanding of networking concepts supporting MECM components such as DP distribution, boundary groups, and PXE services.
Ability to work in a highly collaborative, forward thinking, and innovation-driven environment.
Knowledge of Agile and DevSecOps/SRE concepts and best practices, with a desire to grow that knowledge.
Hand-on experience with Atlassian products (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, etc.).
Experience creating JIRA and/or Azure DevOps workflows, projects, custom configurations.
Experience administrating/maintaining SRE platform via Ansible playbooks (e.g. upgrading Jenkins).
Experience in automating tasks with scripting languages like PowerShell, or Python.
Integrating/maintaining with various 3rd party CI/CD tools like Jenkins and Gitlab.
Experience with commercial cloud infrastructure deployment environments such as AWS and Azure.
Experience with automated provisioning and configuration tools like Terraform, Cloud Formation, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or similar technologies.
Working knowledge of the Risk Management Framework (RMF), DISA STIGs.

Nice To Haves

Previous work experience providing support to the NGEN-NMCI program.
Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation for automating test environments.
ITILv4, Scrum Master, or Agile SAFe certification(s) or applicable experience.

Responsibilities

Work alongside the development and operations teams to ensure speedy and reliable software deployments, monitor systems, and improve overall reliability of the platform.
Discover and document system bugs and fix them.
Develop features utilize the AI coding tool and repository of scripts to automate, scale, test, and secure the cloud infrastructure and the pipelines.
Enhance performance monitoring of the various systems via Splunk or other dashboard reporting tools.
Identify performance bottlenecks and optimize the performance of cloud infrastructure.
Contribute to continuing our SRE journey by suggesting ways to improve engineering build, maintenance, automation and reliability across the platform with SRE/DevOps tools and Infrastructure-as-Code.
Develop and code high-quality pipeline automation workflows to support inside and outside the cloud platform that are appropriate for business and technology strategies.
Develop and execute test strategies that simulate real-world failure scenarios, including network disruptions, hardware failures, and system overloads.
Create, script, and run performance tests to measure system behavior under varying levels of load and traffic. Identify bottlenecks, performance degradation, and areas for optimization.
Design, implement, and maintain automated test suites for infrastructure and application components. Ensure that testing is integrated into the CI/CD pipeline to validate system reliability with every release.
Build automated systems for continuous performance testing, stress testing, and load testing.
Work closely with SREs, developers, and operations teams to define reliability goals and develop appropriate testing strategies to validate those goals.
Ensure that new services and features undergo thorough testing for performance, reliability, and failure recovery before deployment to production.
Validate that monitoring, logging, and alerting mechanisms are functioning correctly by testing systems under failure conditions.
Ensure that Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are accurately measured and tracked through automated testing frameworks.
Resolve most conflicts between timeline, budget, and scope independently but intuitively raise sophisticated or consequential issues to senior management.