Virtualization / Automation Engineer (Journeyman)

DecisionPoint | Cortek•Chicago, IL

4h•Remote

About The Position

DecisionPoint seeks a Virtualization / Automation Engineer to operate, maintain, automate, and improve virtualization and Software-Defined Data Center platforms supporting the USMEPCOM ENLIST program. The role supports VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager, and related infrastructure-automation capabilities. It maintains secure, available, scalable, and recoverable 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, security, compliance, and recoverability. The position focuses on the virtualization platform and supporting automation. Guest operating systems, applications, databases, and cloud workloads remain the responsibility of their respective teams; this engineer provides and maintains the underlying compute, storage, network-virtualization, and recovery capabilities. The role also supports transitions from on-premises environments to centralized DISA-hosting platforms through discovery, documentation, platform preparation, migration support, validation, and stabilization. The position is remote, with Chicago-area candidates preferred. Occasional on-site support, after-hours maintenance, incident response, and travel may be required. By applying, candidates acknowledge and consent to having their resume 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 six years of relevant experience in virtualization, systems engineering, data-center infrastructure, platform engineering, infrastructure automation, or a related technical discipline.
Hands-on experience administering enterprise hypervisor or Software-Defined Data Center 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, executing, or maintaining infrastructure-automation solutions.
Experience troubleshooting issues across virtualization, compute, storage, network, and automation layers.
Knowledge of high availability, disaster recovery, backup, restoration, capacity management, performance monitoring, and infrastructure lifecycle practices.
Ability to create and maintain technical procedures, automation documentation, configuration records, architecture diagrams, and recovery documentation.
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.
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 DISA Security Technical Implementation Guides, Risk Management Framework controls, vulnerability remediation, and configuration compliance.
Experience integrating virtualization platforms with hybrid-cloud, COOP, or disaster-recovery environments.
Experience developing Infrastructure as Code within controlled version-control and CI/CD workflows.
Experience with Git, automated testing, peer review, code scanning, and configuration-drift detection.
Experience supporting data-center modernization, platform migrations, or hosting transitions.
ITIL v4 Foundation certification.
Relevant cloud, security, storage, or network certification.

Responsibilities

Configure, administer, maintain, troubleshoot, and optimize enterprise hypervisor and Software-Defined Data Center platforms.
Support VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager, and associated platform-management capabilities.
Maintain virtualization clusters supporting production, development, testing, COOP, and disaster-recovery environments.
Configure and support vSphere High Availability, Distributed Resource Scheduler, resource pools, clusters, hosts, datastores, distributed switches, and related platform services.
Support ESXi host and vCenter installation, configuration, patching, upgrades, certificate maintenance, and lifecycle activities.
Monitor platform capacity, availability, performance, utilization, health, and configuration compliance; analyze resource and cluster utilization and recommend corrective or capacity actions.
Configure and support vSAN clusters, disk groups, storage policies, capacity controls, fault domains, and health monitoring; troubleshoot related capacity, performance, availability, resynchronization, hardware, and policy-compliance issues.
Configure and support approved NSX network-virtualization capabilities, including segments, transport zones, gateways, virtual switching, routing, and distributed security controls, coordinating with relevant technical teams.
Administer Site Recovery Manager configurations, protection groups, inventory and network mappings, and recovery plans; execute and document approved recovery-plan tests, failovers, and failbacks.
Support quarterly COOP exercises, disaster-recovery testing, backup restoration, and continuity events; document results, deficiencies, corrective actions, and lessons learned.
Develop and maintain infrastructure automation using Terraform, Ansible, PowerCLI, APIs, or comparable tools, including reusable modules, playbooks, scripts, templates, and workflows.
Maintain automation code in approved version-control repositories and follow peer-review, testing, approval, release, rollback, documentation, logging, error-handling, secrets-protection, state-management, and validation procedures.
Automate authorized repetitive administrative and configuration activities, support automated configuration-baseline checks, and identify drift from approved standards.
Support infrastructure provisioning while preserving the division between platform ownership and guest operating-system, application, database, and workload ownership.
Coordinate with system administrators and workload owners on resource requirements, placement, templates, snapshots, virtual hardware, and platform dependencies.
Coordinate with storage, network, cloud, application, database, and cybersecurity teams to troubleshoot cross-platform incidents.
Provide advanced engineering support for virtualization, software-defined storage, network virtualization, automation, and recovery issues.
Support outage response by isolating platform failures, restoring services, implementing approved workarounds, and providing technical status updates.
Collect platform logs, events, performance information, configuration data, and other evidence for root-cause analysis; implement approved corrective and preventive actions.
Maintain backups of applicable platform configurations and support restoration testing.
Apply approved platform security baselines, patches, hardening settings, and configuration standards; support DISA STIG and vulnerability-directive compliance.
Assist with Risk Management Framework control implementation, evidence collection, assessment support, and remediation.
Review vendor notices, vulnerabilities, patches, and lifecycle information for potential platform impact.
Support technology refreshes and modernization involving compute, storage, network virtualization, hyperconverged infrastructure, and SDDC capabilities.
Assist with assessments of capacity, technical debt, security gaps, lifecycle risks, and modernization opportunities; contribute technical information to architecture options, plans, schedules, cost estimates, and engineering recommendations.
Support transitions of applicable infrastructure and services to centralized DISA-hosting platforms, including discovery, inventory and dependency documentation, readiness assessments, and coordination with workload owners.
Support migration test plans, implementation and rollback procedures, cutovers, validation, and post-migration stabilization; coordinate with Government stakeholders, DISA representatives, vendors, and technical teams.
Support integration of SDDC capabilities with cloud, COOP, and on-premises environments.
Develop and maintain architecture diagrams, as-built documentation, configuration baselines, standard operating procedures, automation documentation, and recovery procedures.
Follow approved change, release, incident, problem, configuration, security, and quality-management processes.
Provide platform metrics, capacity information, accomplishments, risks, issues, and modernization status for program reporting.