Virtualization / Automation Engineer (Senior)

DecisionPoint | Cortek•Chicago, IL

4h•Remote

About The Position

DecisionPoint seeks a senior Virtualization / Automation Engineer to design, operate, secure, automate, and modernize the virtualization and Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) platforms supporting the USMEPCOM ENLIST program. The position owns the hypervisor and SDDC platform layers, including VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager, and related infrastructure-automation capabilities. It maintains reliable, secure, and scalable services across production, development, testing, COOP, disaster-recovery, and hybrid-hosting environments, and develops Infrastructure as Code and configuration-automation solutions to improve consistency, deployment speed, recoverability, security, and operational visibility. The role focuses on virtualization-platform engineering and automation. Routine ownership of guest operating systems, applications, databases, and cloud workloads remains with the appropriate teams; this engineer provides the underlying platform capabilities and coordinates with those teams to resolve cross-layer issues. The engineer also supports transitions of applicable services from on-premises infrastructure to centralized DISA-hosting platforms, including discovery, dependency analysis, readiness assessment, migration planning, technical validation, cutover support, and post-transition stabilization. The position is remote, with Chicago-area candidates preferred. Occasional on-site support, after-hours maintenance, incident response, and travel may be required. Applicants acknowledge and consent to having their resumes included in an active competitive government contract bid.

Requirements

Active Secret clearance or higher.
Bachelor’s degree in information technology, computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience where permitted by the applicable labor category.
At least eight years of relevant experience in virtualization, systems engineering, data-center infrastructure, platform engineering, infrastructure automation, or a related technical discipline.
Hands-on experience engineering or administering enterprise hypervisor or SDDC platforms.
Experience with VMware vSphere, ESXi, and vCenter in an enterprise environment.
Experience supporting vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager, or comparable software-defined storage, network-virtualization, and disaster-recovery technologies.
Experience developing or maintaining infrastructure-automation solutions.
Experience supporting highly available, mission-critical enterprise infrastructure.
Experience troubleshooting complex issues across compute, storage, network, virtualization, and automation layers.
Knowledge of high availability, disaster recovery, backup, restoration, capacity management, performance management, and infrastructure lifecycle practices.
Ability to develop architecture diagrams, technical procedures, automation documentation, recovery plans, and engineering recommendations.
Ability to support after-hours maintenance, disaster-recovery exercises, and critical incident response when required.
Strong written, verbal, analytical, and technical problem-solving skills.

Nice To Haves

Formal Terraform training.
Formal Ansible training.
VMware Certified Professional certification.
VMware Certified Advanced Professional or another advanced VMware certification.
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate certification.
Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation or comparable automation certification.
Experience with VMware Cloud Foundation or VMware Aria automation and operations capabilities.
Experience with PowerCLI, PowerShell, Python, REST APIs, or comparable scripting technologies.
Experience supporting federal or Department of Defense virtualization environments.
Experience supporting DISA-hosted services or migrations to DISA enterprise-hosting platforms.
Experience with DoD Security Technical Implementation Guides, Risk Management Framework controls, vulnerability remediation, and configuration compliance.
Experience integrating virtualization platforms with hybrid-cloud, COOP, and disaster-recovery environments.
Experience developing Infrastructure as Code within controlled CI/CD and version-control workflows.
Experience with Git, automated testing, peer review, code scanning, and configuration-drift detection.
Experience supporting large-scale platform migrations, data-center modernization, or hosting transitions.
ITIL v4 Foundation certification.
Relevant cloud, security, storage, or network certification.

Responsibilities

Design, configure, administer, maintain, and optimize enterprise hypervisor and SDDC platforms.
Own the engineering of VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager, and related platform-management capabilities.
Establish platform architecture, configuration standards, operational procedures, and engineering roadmaps.
Build and maintain highly available virtualization clusters for production, development, testing, and recovery environments.
Configure and optimize vSphere HA, DRS, resource pools, clusters, hosts, datastores, distributed switches, and related platform services.
Manage ESXi hosts, vCenter services, certificates, licensing, upgrades, patches, firmware dependencies, and approved security configurations.
Monitor platform capacity, availability, utilization, performance, health, and configuration compliance; analyze resource utilization and recommend scaling, balancing, or remediation.
Engineer and maintain vSAN clusters, storage policies, fault domains, capacity controls, health monitoring, and recovery processes; troubleshoot related performance, availability, resynchronization, hardware, and compliance issues.
Engineer and support NSX network-virtualization capabilities, including segments, transport zones, gateways, routing, switching, distributed security controls, and platform connectivity; coordinate changes with relevant teams.
Administer Site Recovery Manager configurations, protection groups, recovery plans, inventory and network mappings, and recovery priorities.
Develop, test, document, and maintain automated failover and failback procedures; support COOP exercises, disaster-recovery tests, restoration activities, and continuity events.
Validate recovery objectives and document exercise results, deficiencies, corrective actions, and lessons learned.
Design and implement infrastructure automation using Terraform, Ansible, PowerCLI, APIs, or comparable tools; create reusable modules, playbooks, scripts, templates, and pipelines.
Use approved version-control repositories and established review, testing, approval, and release practices; implement error handling, logging, secrets protection, state management, rollback, and validation in automation.
Automate repetitive activities securely and establish automated configuration checks to identify drift from approved baselines.
Support infrastructure provisioning while maintaining the division between platform ownership and guest operating-system, application, database, or workload ownership.
Coordinate with system administrators, workload owners, and storage, network, cloud, cybersecurity, and application teams on requirements, placement, dependencies, and cross-platform incidents.
Provide Tier 4 engineering support for complex virtualization, storage, network-virtualization, automation, and recovery incidents; support outage response and provide technical status information.
Conduct root-cause analyses and develop corrective and preventive actions for recurring incidents.
Maintain backups of applicable platform configurations and test restoration procedures.
Develop and enforce platform standards aligned with DISA STIGs, vulnerability directives, and approved security requirements; support RMF implementation, evidence collection, remediation, and assessments.
Evaluate vulnerabilities, vendor advisories, security patches, and configuration changes for operational impact.
Support technology refreshes and modernization initiatives; assess technical debt, capacity constraints, security gaps, and lifecycle risks; develop roadmaps, options, migration approaches, cost estimates, and recommendations.
Support transitions of applicable infrastructure and services to centralized DISA-hosting platforms, including discovery, inventory and dependency documentation, readiness assessments, migration waves, test and rollback plans, cutovers, validation, and stabilization.
Coordinate hosting-transition activities with DISA, Government stakeholders, vendors, and technical teams.
Integrate SDDC capabilities with cloud, COOP, and on-premises environments to support workload mobility, resilient operations, and enterprise service orchestration.
Develop and maintain architecture diagrams, as-built documentation, configuration baselines, procedures, automation documentation, recovery procedures, and engineering records.
Follow approved change, release, configuration, incident, problem, security, and quality-management processes.
Provide platform metrics, capacity data, risks, issues, accomplishments, and modernization status for program reporting.