Senior Virtualization Engineer

About the role

Leidos Defense Group is seeking a Senior Virtualization Engineer to support AFNCR IT Services at Joint Base Andrews. You will provide IT operations, maintenance, planning, projects, and engineering support for Headquarters Air Force, Air Force District of Washington, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other Air Force activities across Pentagon, Joint Base Andrews, Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, leased spaces, and alternate sites in a high-availability environment where AFNCR operations must never fail.

Responsibilities

• Provide operational support for VMware/Nutanix clusters supporting Air Force District of Washington (AFDW), including design, deployment, configuration, and maintenance.
• Monitor system metrics to ensure high availability, scalability, and peak performance of VMware/Nutanix infrastructure.
• Perform troubleshooting and root cause analysis for complex technical issues.
• Serve as Subject Matter Expert (SME) for VMware & Nutanix infrastructures and train other engineers on use, maintenance, and cluster analysis.
• Maintain patches and upgrades to all hyper-converged software, applications, and underlying hardware from Nutanix and VMware.
• Lead and support projects involving migration of virtual machines and applications from legacy platforms (e.g., VMware) to the Nutanix platform.
• Develop and maintain comprehensive virtualization documentation for system configurations, security plans, and operational procedures to support compliance audits and ensure system integrity.
• Participate in weekly Internal Design Review (IDR)/Change Control Board (CCB).
• Collaborate with other engineers to monitor and maintain physical hosts, storage, network, and security infrastructure, reporting issues and outages as necessary.
• Utilize VMware Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations Manager) to monitor vCenter environments and forecast virtualization capacity.
• Work closely with cybersecurity personnel, network engineers, and application owners to deliver secure, robust, and efficient solutions.
• Ensure compliance with DoD mandates, including DISA STIGs and NIST SP 800-171.
• Support on-call rotation.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree with a minimum of 12+ years of related experience or a Master’s degree and 10+ years of experience; additional years of relevant experience may be accepted in lieu of a degree.
• Must possess an active DoD Security Clearance (Secret or Top Secret).
• 10+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering with a strong focus on VMware and/or Nutanix environments.
• Requires a current 8140 IAT Level II (Intermediate or Advanced) certificate (e.g., CompTIA Security+).
• Active VMware Certified Professional (6.0 or higher) and active Nutanix Certified Professional (NCP) or Nutanix Certified Systems Engineer (NCSE).
• Verifiable experience working within a DoD or defense contractor environment, with a strong understanding of its unique operational and security demands.
• Deep knowledge of virtualization technologies, including VMware and Nutanix.
• Strong expertise in Nutanix AOS, AHV, Prism, and Flow.
• Proficiency in managing Windows Server and Linux environments.
• Hands-on experience implementing and managing systems compliant with DISA STIGs and NIST SP 800-171.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with infrastructure automation tools such as Ansible or Terraform, and scripting languages like Python or PowerShell.
• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals, including switching, VLANs, firewalls, and micro-segmentation.
• Experience working in air-gapped or classified network environments (e.g., SIPRNet) is highly desirable.
• Experience with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) using Omnissa.
• Knowledge of Air Force, Pentagon, and/or AFNCR operations.
• Experience working at the Pentagon, Joint Base Andrews (JBA), and Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling (JBAB).

Pay

Pay range: $131,300.00 – $237,350.00. Actual compensation is determined by job responsibilities, education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities, internal equity, market data alignment, applicable bargaining agreements, and other applicable law.