Virtualization / Automation Engineer (Senior)

DecisionPoint seeks a Virtualization / Automation Engineer to design, operate, secure, automate, and modernize the virtualization and Software-Defined Data Center platforms supporting the USMEPCOM ENLIST program. This senior engineering position owns the hypervisor and SDDC platform layers, including VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager, and associated infrastructure-automation capabilities. 

The Virtualization / Automation Engineer maintains reliable, secure, and scalable platform services across production, development, testing, COOP, disaster-recovery, and hybrid-hosting environments. The position develops Infrastructure as Code and configuration-automation solutions that improve consistency, deployment speed, recoverability, security, and operational visibility. 

This role is focused on virtualization-platform engineering and automation. Routine ownership of guest operating systems, applications, databases, and cloud workloads remains with the appropriate system, application, database, and cloud teams. The engineer establishes and maintains the underlying platform capabilities those teams consume and coordinates closely with them to resolve cross-layer issues. 

The engineer also supports the transition of applicable services from on-premises infrastructure to centralized DISA-hosting platforms. This includes discovery, dependency analysis, platform readiness, migration planning, technical validation, cutover support, and post-transition stabilization. 

This position is remote, with Chicago-area candidates preferred. Occasional on-site support, after-hours maintenance, incident response, and travel may be required. 

Note: By applying to this position, you acknowledge and consent to having your resume included in an active competitive government contract bid. 

The Virtualization / Automation Engineer will: 

• Design, configure, administer, maintain, and optimize enterprise hypervisor and Software-Defined Data Center platforms. 
• Serve as the senior engineering owner for VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager, and associated platform-management capabilities. 
• Establish platform architecture, configuration standards, operational procedures, and engineering roadmaps. 
• Build and maintain highly available virtualization clusters supporting production, development, testing, and recovery environments. 
• Configure and optimize vSphere High Availability, Distributed Resource Scheduler, resource pools, clusters, hosts, datastores, distributed switches, and related platform services. 
• Manage ESXi hosts, vCenter services, platform certificates, licensing, upgrades, patches, firmware dependencies, and approved security configurations. 
• Monitor platform capacity, availability, utilization, performance, health, and configuration compliance. 
• Analyze processor, memory, storage, network, and cluster utilization and recommend scaling, balancing, or remediation actions. 
• Engineer and maintain vSAN clusters, disk groups, storage policies, fault domains, capacity controls, health monitoring, and recovery processes. 
• Troubleshoot vSAN performance, availability, resynchronization, capacity, hardware, and policy-compliance issues. 
• Engineer and support NSX network-virtualization capabilities, including segments, transport zones, gateways, routing, switching, distributed security controls, and platform connectivity. 
• Coordinate NSX changes with network, cybersecurity, application, and cloud teams. 
• Administer and maintain VMware Site Recovery Manager configurations, protection groups, recovery plans, inventory mappings, network mappings, and recovery priorities. 
• Develop, test, document, and maintain automated failover and failback procedures. 
• Support COOP exercises, disaster-recovery tests, system-restoration activities, and actual continuity events. 
• Validate platform 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. 
• Develop reusable modules, playbooks, scripts, templates, and pipelines for provisioning, configuration, validation, patching, compliance, and recovery. 
• Store automation code in approved version-control repositories and follow established review, testing, approval, and release practices. 
• Implement appropriate error handling, logging, secrets protection, state management, rollback, and validation within automation solutions. 
• Eliminate repetitive manual activities through secure, tested, and supportable automation. 
• Establish automated configuration checks and identify drift from approved platform baselines. 
• Support infrastructure provisioning while preserving the division between virtualization-platform ownership and guest operating-system, application, database, or workload ownership. 
• Coordinate with system administrators and workload owners on resource requirements, virtual-machine placement, templates, snapshots, virtual hardware, and platform dependencies. 
• Coordinate with storage, network, cloud, cybersecurity, and application teams to diagnose cross-platform incidents. 
• Provide Tier 4 engineering support for complex virtualization, storage, network-virtualization, automation, and recovery incidents. 
• Support outage response by isolating platform faults, restoring affected capabilities, implementing approved workarounds, and providing technical status information. 
• Conduct root-cause analyses and develop corrective and preventive actions for recurring platform incidents. 
• Maintain current backups of applicable platform configurations and test restoration procedures. 
• Develop and enforce platform standards aligned with DISA Security Technical Implementation Guides, vulnerability directives, and approved security requirements. 
• Support Risk Management Framework control implementation, technical evidence collection, remediation, and assessment activities for the virtualization platform. 
• Evaluate platform vulnerabilities, vendor advisories, security patches, and configuration changes for operational impact. 
• Support technology refreshes and modernization initiatives involving compute, storage, network virtualization, hyperconverged infrastructure, and SDDC capabilities. 
• Assess existing virtualization capabilities, technical debt, capacity constraints, security gaps, and lifecycle risks. 
• Develop platform roadmaps, technical options, migration approaches, rough-order cost estimates, and implementation recommendations. 
• Support the transition of applicable infrastructure and services to centralized DISA-hosting platforms. 
• Perform discovery and document platform inventories, configurations, interdependencies, interfaces, network requirements, storage requirements, recovery requirements, and migration constraints. 
• Assess workload and platform readiness while coordinating with the teams responsible for guest operating systems, applications, databases, and cloud workloads. 
• Develop and support migration waves, test plans, rollback plans, cutover procedures, validation criteria, and stabilization activities. 
• Coordinate with DISA, Government stakeholders, vendors, and technical teams during hosting-transition activities. 
• 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, standard operating 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. 

Required Qualifications 

Candidates must meet all of the following 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. 
• Minimum of 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 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 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. 

Preferred Qualifications 

The following qualifications are preferred but are not required: 

• 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. 

Skills and Competencies 

• Enterprise virtualization and SDDC engineering. 
• VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, and SRM. 
• Infrastructure as Code and configuration automation. 
• High availability, disaster recovery, and COOP support. 
• Platform capacity, performance, and lifecycle management. 
• Secure platform configuration and compliance. 
• Complex infrastructure troubleshooting and root-cause analysis. 
• Hybrid-hosting and migration planning. 
• Architecture and technical-documentation development. 
• Cross-functional engineering coordination. 
• Controlled change and release implementation. 
• Strong attention to detail and configuration discipline. 
• Ability to distinguish platform responsibilities from guest operating-system and workload ownership. 

• EEO and Affirmative Action Policy: DecisionPoint Corporation is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. It is the policy of DecisionPoint Corporation to provide equal employment opportunity in accordance with all applicable Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action laws, directives and regulations to all employees and qualified applicants without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, disability status, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other protected status under Federal, State or Local laws.
• Pay Transparency Policy: In accordance with Presidential Executive Order 13665, DecisionPoint Corporation will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the contractor's legal duty to furnish information.
• Authorization to Share Resume and Personal Information: By expressing your interest and submitting your resume for this position, you authorize DecisionPoint Corporation to share your resume, as well as personal information included on the resume, with its subsidiaries, affiliates and teaming partners for the purpose of considering you for this position and other available positions requiring comparable skills, education and experience. Should DecisionPoint Corporation. or its affiliates and teaming partners wish to initiate pre-employment discussions, you will be asked to complete an employment application and related employment documents.