Senior Systems Engineer - Infrastructure - Active Top Secret Clearance

Riptide Technology is hiring a Senior Systems Engineer - Infrastructure for a new, five-year contract award to support our government customer based in Suitland, MD. This is an excellent career opportunity with unlimited growth potential. 

The Senior Systems Engineer - Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI)/ Virtualization services as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) in the technologies – systems, applications, and services – which make up the customer’s Information Technology (IT) enterprise hosting platforms. Specifically, the Engineer will be responsible for a variety of engineering and operational assignments associated with all storage, virtualization (appliances, servers, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), etc.), and data protection (backups, replication, disaster recovery, etc.) technologies across multiple enterprise-level IT systems in support of the customer’s data center environments.

The Senior Systems Engineer HCI directly supports, and oversees, all Infrastructure team Operations and Maintenance (O&M) tasking of deployed operational solutions backed by Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware. When issues, incidents, and/or problems arise, the Senior Systems Engineer

support, oversee, and may be called to be hands-on, the Infrastructure team’s troubleshooting and problem resolution effort, including Root Cause Analysis (RCA).

The Senior Systems Engineer HCI is responsible for ensuring the Infrastructure team as a whole produce and maintain documentation of the Infrastructure system(s), sub-system(s), and component(s) in the customer’s IT hosting portfolio, including as-built documentation, capacity/performance plans, as well as all other area of server system life-cycle planning. 

The Senior Systems Engineer HCI also works directly with the customer’s IT Architecture and Engineering (A&E) team to consistently explore, investigate, research, analyze, and assess new technologies to modernize and improve upon exiting Infrastructure solutions. Infrequent travel may be required to support the customer’s IT enterprise, specifically Infrastructure related systems, at data centers or remote sites away from their primary location, but all routine operations are fully performed remotely. Normally, travel should not exceed 15% annually.

• Security Clearance: This position will require U.S. citizenship and an active DoD TS/SCI clearance, with a CI Poly preferred. The ability to obtain a CI poly is required.
• Shall have 7 or more years of proven hands-on experience engineering, implementing, and providing O&M support for globally dispersed enterprise-level Nutanix and/or VMware virtualization systems providing virtualization capabilities such as Guest desktop and server virtualization.
• Shall have 5 or more years of proven hands-on experience engineering, implementing, and providing O&M support for globally dispersed enterprise-level NetApp storage systems (Alta Vault, ONTAP, StorageGRID, etc.) providing enterprise storage services including Block (iSCSI) and File (CIFS, NFS) level storage and data protection (disaster recovery, migration, replication, snapshots, etc.) to a variety of end-point consumers (desktops, servers, hypervisors, etc.)
• Shall have 5 or more years of experience designing, engineering, implementing, and maintaining solutions in secure processing environments which must adhere to U.S. Government Information Assurance and Security standards such as the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs).
• Shall have 3 or more years of proven hands-on experience implementing, operating, and maintaining HCI solutions to provide virtualization, storage, data protection, and networking services to an IT enterprise information system. Ideally this HCI experience would be based on the Nutanix ECP.
• Demonstrated experience monitoring and assessing virtualization and storage infrastructure systems and solutions proactively for performance degradation, and tuning and optimization opportunities.
• Demonstrated experience leading, directing, and evaluating task execution and performance exercising latitude and independence of globally dispersed teams to successfully meet team objectives, goals, and deadlines as expected.
• Shall meet the Cyber IT/Cybersecurity Workforce (CSWF) System Administrator (451); Intermediate Level for SECNAV M-5239.2 compliance. (See Navy Cool WebSite)

• Strongly desired to be NetApp certified in NetApp Certified Implementation Engineer (NCIE) – Data Protection Specialist, and NCIE – SAN Specialist, ONTAP.
• Strongly desired to be certified in an enterprise-level virtualization vendor, such as Microsoft, Nutanix, or VMware. Ideally, be certified Nutanix Certified Advanced Professional (NCAP).
• Strong understanding of the different physical storage system configuration options (compute, networking, disk shelf, disk drive type, disk drive speed, etc.), their recommended use cases, as well as general best practices for achieving optimal and efficient storage solutions, especially for high-performing consumers.
• Strong understanding of tiered storage system configurations, their recommended use cases, and general best practices for providing the right level of storage service to the requesting consumer.
• Strong understanding of virtualization hypervisor offerings from Microsoft, Nutanix, and VMware and how to efficiently deploy, configure, secure, and operate them to provide optimal virtualization-based hosting services to the enterprise.
• Strong understanding of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) technologies, such as the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, and their capabilities to offer scalable converged compute and storage enterprise-level virtual workloads.
• Strong understanding of data protection technologies, such as those offered by NetApp and Nutanix, to effectively backup, snapshot, replication, archive, and restore all required tiers of storage within pre-defined Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs).
• Demonstrated experience working with on-premises cloud-based Simple Storage Service (S3) solutions to provide enterprise-level unstructured data at scale for various use cases such as data archiving and long-term online backups across globally dispersed data centers.
• Demonstrated experience leveraging Microsoft PowerShell or Python for the purposes of automating and orchestrating routine, as well as complex, administrative and operational tasking.
• Demonstrated experience working with the Veeam Availability Suite to protect, backup, and monitor virtual workloads running on Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere platforms as well as physical workloads via the respective Veeam Agents.
• Demonstrated experience working with Nutanix Calm to provide enterprise-level automation and orchestration capabilities within virtualized data centers to include application lifecycle management, self-service marketplace, governance, and provisioning.
• Demonstrated experience working with Nutanix Flow to provide advanced application-centric networking and information security (INFOSEC) services in order to gain visibility and granular control of enterprise hosted applications.
• Working knowledge of Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) technologies, concepts, and approaches to offering enterprise-level IT services for production business and mission critical workloads.
• Familiarity with Citrix-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) systems, applications, and services such as Virtual Apps and Desktops (formerly XenDesktop) and Application Delivery Controller (ADC) (formerly NetScaler) to offer VDI and Application presentations via a centralized Hosting platform.
• Familiarity with basic Networking troubleshooting concepts and approaches.

• Travel Requirements:
• Travel should not exceed 15% annually.
•  Education: 
• Bachelor's degree from an Accredited University; or
•  Certifications: 
• GIAC Security Essentials (GSEC); or
• Security+ Continuing Education (CE); or
• Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP)
•  Security Clearance Requirements: This position will require U.S. citizenship and an active DoD TS/SCI clearance. The position requires the ability to obtain and  maintain a Counterintelligence (CI) Polygraph.

Riptide Technology, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer ensuring no employee or prospective employee will be discriminated against based on race, color, national origin, age, religion, disability status, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information or marital status with regards to recruitment, hiring, upgrading, promotion or rehiring.