Senior Systems Engineer

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end health of a mission-critical Veterans Affairs (VA) production environment that directly impacts the daily lives of millions of U.S. veterans. You will be the senior technical authority who ensures 24×7 availability, security, and performance of cloud and on-premise systems that process medical claims, benefits data, and clinical workflows.
• • Detect, isolate, and resolve complex system outages within SLA-defined windows by leveraging deep Linux/Unix and Windows expertise, advanced cloud-native tooling, and rigorous root-cause analysis. Every minute you save translates into faster care and benefits delivery for veterans.
• • Architect, deploy, and maintain highly-available AWS or Azure infrastructures using Infrastructure-as-Code (CloudFormation, Terraform, ARM) and configuration-management automation (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, SaltStack). You will continuously refactor and optimize the stack to reduce cost, increase resilience, and enable rapid feature delivery.
• • Build and tune CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, AWS CodeBuild/CodeDeploy, Azure DevOps) that push code, schema, and configuration changes into production multiple times per day with zero downtime. Your pipelines will be the gold standard for repeatable, auditable, and secure releases across VA environments.
• • Provide Tier-3/Tier-4 escalation support for hardware, OS, network, and application issues spanning workstations, printers, routers, switches, VPNs, and cloud services. You will mentor junior engineers and create runbooks that shrink MTTR and expand institutional knowledge.
• • Implement and validate security controls aligned with VA, NIST, and FedRAMP standards—hardening images, managing IAM policies, patching vulnerabilities, and conducting compliance audits. You will be the last line of defense against threats targeting veteran data.
• • Monitor, alert, and capacity-plan using Dynatrace, ScienceLogic, CloudWatch, and custom dashboards. You will translate metrics into actionable insights that prevent incidents before they occur and justify infrastructure investments to senior leadership.
• • Maintain an accurate CMDB and asset inventory, ensuring every server, database, and network device is tracked, licensed, and disposed of in accordance with federal regulations.
• • Author clear, concise technical documentation—architecture diagrams, SOPs, incident reports, and user guides—that empower cross-functional teams and satisfy VA audit requirements.
• • Deliver end-user and admin training sessions, brown-bag talks, and knowledge-base articles that elevate the technical acumen of VA staff and contractor teammates.
• • Collaborate daily with product owners, clinicians, and policy stakeholders to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions. Your ability to speak both "geek" and "veteran services" will drive alignment and accelerate delivery.
• • Champion a culture of continuous improvement by introducing SRE practices, chaos engineering, and blameless post-mortems that turn every incident into a learning opportunity.
• • Ensure all work complies with Public Trust (MBI) security requirements and VA standards; participate in security investigations, background checks, and periodic reauthorization processes as required.