Platform Operations Engineer (Hybrid Infrastructure)

Platform Operations Engineer (Hybrid Infrastructure)

Position Summary

The Platform Operations Engineer is instrumental in managing on-premises and hybrid infrastructure platforms that are vital for mission-critical operations. This position emphasizes platform reliability, operational stability, and infrastructure advancement in a governmental or regulated setting.

The engineer will collaborate with an established internal team and Level 1 vendor engineers to oversee daily operational support, ensure prompt incident resolution, and provide in-depth technical analysis as necessary.

This role encompasses responsibilities for technical and security governance, including evaluating technical changes, facilitating service request (SR) reviews and approvals, and ensuring that infrastructure modifications and operations are consistent with operational, security, and architectural standards.

The engineer will aid in a multi-year technology refresh initiative while sustaining stable daily operations with minimal disruption. Additionally, the position includes responsibilities for technical project coordination, such as planning, tracking dependencies, managing risks and issues, and driving follow-ups across internal teams and vendors to facilitate the agency's long-term transition to cloud and hybrid infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities

1. Operational Support and Maintenance

• Collaborate with L1 vendor engineers and the internal team to manage daily operational support and maintenance of essential infrastructure platforms across on-premises and hybrid settings.

2. Infrastructure Platform Oversight

• Deliver technical oversight encompassing compute, storage, virtualization, operating systems, backup, disaster recovery (DR), high availability (HA), and associated infrastructure platforms.

3. Incident Management

• Lead incident management for intricate issues, including technical investigations, root cause analysis, recovery strategy development, and timely follow-up for resolution.

4. Vendor Management and Coordination

• Oversee and coordinate vendor engagements to ensure operational tasks, incidents, service requests, and technical deliverables are fulfilled efficiently and within designated timelines.

5. Technical Review and Governance

• Evaluate and examine technical changes, service requests (SRs), implementation strategies, and recovery plans to ensure they are feasible, supportable, and compliant with operational, security, and architectural criteria.

6. Security and Compliance Support

• Assist in technical and security governance initiatives, including change evaluations, risk awareness, compliance alignment, and operational readiness assessments.

7. Infrastructure Modernization

• Contribute to infrastructure modernization and the multi-year technology refresh initiative while ensuring stable daily operations with minimal downtime.

8. Project Coordination

• Plan, manage, and monitor technical infrastructure activities across internal teams and vendors for refresh, upgrade, migration, and other technical project efforts.

9. Risk and Dependency Management

• Monitor project risks, issues, dependencies, action items, and status updates to ensure milestones, operational commitments, and implementation readiness are achieved.

10. Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Engage with application, network, security, and vendor teams to resolve platform-related challenges and maintain runbooks, SOPs, governance artifacts, and supporting documentation.

Requirements

Experience

• A minimum of 5 years of experience in infrastructure or platform operations.
• Experience in supporting production or mission-critical environments.
• Strong technical expertise in infrastructure operations across virtualization, operating systems, storage, backup, networking, and related platforms.
• Experience in working with vendor-supported operating frameworks and managing external support teams.
• Capable of engaging in technical troubleshooting, in-depth issue analysis, and resolution for complex incidents.
• Preferred experience in supporting technical governance, security governance, change reviews, or service request approval processes.
• Experience in facilitating technical project delivery, including coordination, risk and issue tracking, dependency management, and stakeholder engagement.
• At least 2 years of experience in governmental or public sector environments.
• Data center operations experience is advantageous.
• Excellent communication and coordination skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Technical Requirements

Infrastructure Platforms

• Familiarity with infrastructure platforms such as VMware, Hyper-V, or Nutanix.
• Experience with Red Hat Linux and/or Windows Server environments.
• Understanding of enterprise storage, backup, high availability, and disaster recovery solutions.
• Strong knowledge of monitoring, observability, logging, and alerting practices.
• Solid comprehension of networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, DNS, routing, firewalls, load balancing, and segmentation.
• Familiarity with hybrid infrastructure environments, including AWS or Azure.

Desired Technical Skills

• Experience with automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or Terraform.
• Knowledge of scripting languages such as Python, PowerShell, or Bash.
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration platforms like Docker or Kubernetes.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for automated provisioning and configuration.

Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.

Desired Certifications

• VMware Certified Professional (VCP).
• Microsoft Certified: Windows Server.
• Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE).
• ITIL v4 Foundation.
• AWS or Azure Associate-level (or equivalent) cloud certifications.