Junior Data Center Engineer

Responsibilities

• Provide comprehensive support across all dimensions of the Data Center environment.
• Deliver Level I and/or Level II technical support to server technicians, network administrators, and support personnel for systems including cabling, power management, space planning, and cooling management in a large and complex Data Center.
• Troubleshoot complex problems spanning multiple subsystems and systems, requiring in‑depth knowledge of the sophisticated Data Center environment.
• Apply a strong background in IT and High‑Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure, including cooling, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and chemical analysis for open and closed‑loop water systems.
• Collaborate on data‑center consolidation efforts, engaging with customers to evaluate, design, and plan consolidation activities.
• Develop innovative solutions to significant and unusual problems, applying new principles, concepts, and practices to address complex or strategic issues.
• Serve as a resource to executive management by providing analysis of information, trends, and goals at a corporate level, contributing to overall success and efficiency of Data Center operations.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant discipline (or equivalent experience).
• Minimum of 2 years of directly related experience; related experience may substitute for education and vice versa.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Department of Energy clearance.
• U.S. citizenship required.

Required Skills

• Experience working in mission‑critical production environments with change control, incident response, and structured troubleshooting.
• Ability to work safely and effectively in live data‑center spaces (DCFIT coordination, raised‑floor environments, cabling standards).
• Strong understanding of L2/L3 networking fundamentals: VLANs, STP, LACP, static routing, OSPF, BGP, ACLs, QoS.
• Experience configuring and supporting major network vendors (any of): Cisco, Arista, Juniper, Mellanox/NVIDIA Networking.
• Familiarity with multipath topologies, spine‑leaf architectures, and high‑bandwidth fabrics.
• Understanding of basic firewall and segmentation concepts (paths, zones, NAT, routing symmetry).
• Familiarity with enterprise cabling best practices: fiber types (LR/SR/ER), transceiver selection, rack elevation awareness.
• Working knowledge of monitoring and telemetry tools such as CloudVision, Netropy/Apposite, Nagios, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar.
• Ability to follow SOPs/MOPs, support planned change windows, and adhere to structured rollback/validation procedures.
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting abilities, with a demonstrated ability to drive issues to resolution during outages.
• Clear verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to participate in on‑call rotations and support after‑hours change windows if needed.

Desired Skills

• Hands‑on experience with Arista EOS, Cisco NX‑OS, Juniper JunOS, or Mellanox/NVIDIA platforms supporting 40/100/400 Gbps networks.
• Experience with BGP tuning, traffic‑engineering policies, ECMP management, asymmetric‑routing detection, and complex route‑map design.
• Familiarity with EVPN/VXLAN, modern data‑center underlays, and high‑availability routing gateway designs (HA router pairs, blue/green cutovers).
• Experience troubleshooting firewall pathing issues, zone interactions, NAT64/NAT policy behavior, and segmentation used for HPC.
• Exposure to HPC networks and interconnects: RDMA, RoCE, basic InfiniBand concepts (subnet managers, fabric behavior).
• Understanding of congestion behaviors common in HPC (parallel I/O bursts, GPU‑node communication patterns).
• Familiarity moving or supporting HPC data flows across multi‑site infrastructures (tri‑lab WAN, DisCom, IHPC routing).
• Understanding of distributed HPC storage systems (Lustre, BeeGFS, Isilon, Spectrum Scale) and routing or MTU constraints around them.
• Ability to work with HPC teams during large cluster deployments (rack placement coordination, switch firmware updates, cabling checks).
• Hands‑on experience with automation or configuration‑management tools (Ansible, Python, Terraform).
• Ability to build or maintain dashboards and telemetry for HPC network utilization (CloudVision pipelines, Netropy test data).
• Familiarity with gNMI/gRPC or streaming telemetry for performance analysis and anomaly detection.
• Understanding of high‑availability designs, reduced failure domains, and deterministic failover patterns in HPC networks.
• Experience monitoring and optimizing latency, packet loss, MTU mismatches, and congestion across crypto tunnels or 100 Gbps transport.
• Ability to assist with capacity planning for rapidly growing HPC systems (rack density, port utilization, fiber paths, WAN circuit expansions).

About Us

Edgewater Federal Solutions is a privately held government‑contracting firm located in Frederick, MD. Founded in 2002, the company is recognized for supporting customer missions through employee empowerment, exceptional services, and timely delivery. Edgewater is ISO 9001, ISO 20000‑1, ISO 27001 certified, appraised at