Senior Cloud Systems Administrator

Overview

Black Canyon Consulting (BCC) is searching for a Senior Cloud Systems Administrator to join an established team of cloud professionals supporting high‑throughput scientific computing and enterprise applications for the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), an institute of the National Institutes of Health. This full‑time opportunity is based at the NCBI in Bethesda, MD. The role involves designing, automating, managing, and optimizing production multi‑cloud environments across Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Responsibilities

• Design, administer, and maintain world‑class environments across GCP and AWS.
• Author, test, review, and maintain modular infrastructure code using Terraform.
• Design and maintain VPCs, subnets, routing tables, security groups, firewall rules, and hybrid interconnects in compliance with federal security standards.
• Implement and maintain telemetry, dashboards, and alerting across AWS CloudWatch/CloudTrail and GCP Cloud Operations.
• Provide support for multi‑cloud infrastructure, including responding to security incidents, performance monitoring, and tuning.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of dedicated, hands‑on enterprise Unix/Linux systems administration experience, with deep technical proficiency in systems internals, networking protocols, filesystems, and troubleshooting.
• 3+ years of direct operational experience administering production workloads in AWS or GCP.
• Strong, demonstrated proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and Git.
• High proficiency with Kubernetes, including multi‑cloud and cloud/on‑prem hybrid environments.
• Practical working knowledge of configuration management using Puppet (manifests, module structure, and Hiera) for systems integration and node provisioning.
• Experience with high‑throughput web services, including HTTP/S internals, request flows, caching semantics, and performance tuning.
• Strong scripting and automation skills in Python and Bash.
• Proven ability to operate independently and collaboratively in a team of senior cloud administrators.

Preferred Qualifications

• Practical operational familiarity with Alma Linux 8 or similar distributions.
• Experience managing cloud environments in federal or biomedical research contexts subject to NIST / FedRAMP security frameworks.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401(k) plan with employer contribution.
• Paid holidays and vacation.
• Tuition reimbursement.
• Competitive salary commensurate with experience and location.