Senior System Administrator

Overview Are you a Senior Systems Administrator who would like to have a positive impact for millions of people? If so, we may have an opportunity for you TISTA associates enjoy above Industry Healthcare Benefits, Remote Working Options, Paid Time Off, Training/Certification opportunities, Healthcare Savings Account & Flexible Savings Account, Paid Life Insurance, Short-term & Long-term Disability, 401K Match, Tuition Reimbursement, Employee Assistance Program, Paid Holidays, Military Leave, and much more Responsibilities The Senior System Administrator/Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)in the VAu2019s Enterprise Cloud is responsible for ensuring the resilience, performance, reliability, and compliance of mission-critical cloud services that support Veterans and VA stakeholders. This role bridges software engineering, systems engineering, and operations to deliver highly available, secure, and efficient cloud-based platforms aligned with VAu2019s modernization strategy and federal compliance mandates, with a focus on reliability, performance, scalability, and automation. Though day-to-day tasks vary, depending on the various organizations and their systems, generally this roleu2019s daily work cadence follows these categories: + Proactively monitor system health, availability, and performance using observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk). + Respond to alerts and incidents, triage issues, and perform root cause analysis (RCA). + Lead on-call rotations to ensure 24/7 uptime and quick recovery from outages. + Document incident reports and contribute to postmortems to prevent recurrence. + Automate manual operational tasks such as deployments, scaling, and configuration using tools like Ansible, Terraform, or Puppet. + Manage infrastructure as code (IaC) to ensure consistency across environments. + Optimize CI/CD pipelines for reliable and repeatable software delivery. + Build self-healing systems to minimize downtime. + Conduct load and stress testing to validate system performance under peak demand. + Establish and enforce Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). + Identify and reduce sources of latency, bottlenecks, and single points of failure. + Work with development teams to design reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance into customer servers. + Patch operating systems, containers, and dependencies to address vulnerabilities. + Ensure compliance with organizational and regulatory requirements. + Implement access controls, secrets management, and least privileged principles. + Monitor resource utilization (CPU, memory, storage, network) to anticipate scaling needs. + Plan for growth by forecasting demand and preparing infrastructure accordingly. + Optimize cloud costs by rightsizing instances, using autoscaling, and leveraging reserved/spot instances. + Partner with software engineers to embed reliability practices into development. + Mentor teams on best practices for observability, automation, and incident handling. + Participate in blameless postmortems and contribute to knowledge-sharing sessions. + Continuously evaluate new tools and technologies to improve system reliability. + Design, monitor, and maintain Customer Servers to meet VAu2019s 99.9%+ uptime and SLA requirements across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. + Implement fault-tolerant and self-healing architectures leveraging automation. + Develop and manage observability frameworks (logging, metrics, tracing) to detect, respond to, and remediate incidents quickly. + Lead blameless postmortems and drive corrective actions to strengthen VAEC resilience. + Engineer scalable automation pipelines for provisioning, patching, and compliance (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, GitHub Actions). + Reduce manual effort through self-service tools for operations teams. + Monitor and optimize application and infrastructure performance to meet demand from VA Medical Centers, Enterprise Data Warehouses, and end users. + Ensure latency, throughput, and resource utilization align with mission needs. + Integrate VA 6500, NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, and Zero Trust requirements into daily operations. + Partner with cybersecurity teams to enforce continuous ATO (cATO) practices and vulnerability remediation. + Collaborate with Release Management, Engineering, and Operations teams to improve change management, deployment pipelines, and reliability practices. + Drive the adoption of SRE principles (error budgets, SLIs, SLOs, SLAs) into VAu2019s IT Service Management (ITSM) processes. + Operate across VAu2019s Enterprise Cloud (VAEC), on-premises data centers, and hybrid platforms, ensuring seamless integration and interoperability. + Support workloads across AWS GovCloud, Microsoft Azure Government, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) where applicable. + Mission Assurance: Continuous availability of systems supporting Veteransu2019 health, benefits, and administrative services. + Operational Efficiency: Automated and standardized cloud operations reduce manual risk and speed delivery. + Compliance Assurance: Alignment with VA 6500, NIST, and federal mandates, minimizing audit risks. + Veteran-Centered Reliability: Ensure services that Veterans depend on are consistently reliable, secure, and performant. Qualifications + 5 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Systems Engineering + Strong experience with Linux/Unix systems administration and troubleshooting + Proficient with cloud platforms (AWS and/or Azure), especially in deploying + Production workloads + Deep understanding of monitoring, metrics, alerting, and observability + Proficient in designing, implementing, and managing automation solutions using Ansible + Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps) + Hands-on with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, AKS) + Familiarity with networking concepts (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, VPCs, load balancing) + Solid understanding of software development lifecycle (SDLC) and Agile methodologies + Comfortable participating in on-call rotations and handling high-priority incidents Preferred Qualifications (optional but preferred): + AWS Certified SysOps Administrator or DevOps Engineer + Linux Certified: Azure Administrator or DevOps Engineer Expert + Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) + Experience in chaos engineering, capacity modeling, or SRE tooling + Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills + Ability to work in cross-functional teams and communicate effectively with developers, operations, and leadership + A strong bias for automation and self-healing systems + Ownership mindset with a commitment to reliability and continuous improvement Education: + Bacheloru2019s degree in computer science, electronics engineering or related technical discipline and 5+ yearsu2019 work experience + Eight (8) years of additional relevant experience may be substituted for education (13 years total) Clearance: + The ability to pass a Tier 4/HIGH Background Investigation Location: + Department of Veteran's Affairs (100% On-site) + Monday - Friday (8:00 AM - 4:30 PM EST Time) + Austin Information Technology Center (AITC) 1615 Woodward Street, Austin, TX 78741

Created: 2025-09-12