Storage Administrator (Entry Level to SME) TS/SCI with Poly REQUIRED

CGI Federal has an exciting opportunity for Storage Administrators within our Intel sector advancing the national security mission through cutting-edge technology. You must have a passion for keeping pace with rapidly evolving technology advancements and leveraging your knowledge on a highly collaborative team to deliver state-of-the-art capabilities. This position is located in our Arlington office; however, a hybrid working model is acceptable.

Responsibilities

Entry Level

• Backup Monitoring: Track scheduled daily and weekly backup jobs across servers to ensure enterprise data is protected.
• Basic Provisioning: Execute simple tasks to allocate disk space or file shares to end-users and servers as requested.
• System Monitoring: Check storage hardware health, network switches, and available storage capacity using standard management tools.
• Issue Triage: Create support tickets and escalate complex connectivity or hardware failures to senior administrators.
• Documentation: Maintain and update basic IT diagrams, network topologies, and routine operating procedures.

Junior Level

• Storage Provisioning: Allocate and map LUNs or shared drives to servers and virtual machines based on predefined requirements.
• Backup & Recovery: Execute and monitor routine data backups, verify the success of backup jobs, and perform basic file or system restorations.
• Performance & Capacity Monitoring: Run reports on disk usage, track data growth trends, and reclaim unused or abandoned storage capacity.
• Hardware & Software Maintenance: Perform routine health checks, apply firmware updates, and help manage hardware lifecycles.
• Tier 1 Troubleshooting: Act as the first point of contact for storage-related incidents, such as latency issues, path failures, or access problems.
• Documentation: Maintain and update network diagrams, operational procedures, and technical documentation.

Mid-Level

• Enterprise Storage Management: Provision and manage block and file storage across multi-vendor environments (e.g., Pure Storage, Dell, NetApp, IBM).
• Incident Resolution: Troubleshoot complex, escalated storage issues, bottlenecks, and fabric/switch (Fiber Channel) connectivity problems.
• Performance Tuning & Monitoring: Utilize monitoring tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, vendor-specific consoles) to track latency, IOPS, and proactively identify bottlenecks.
• Data Protection & Recovery: Execute and verify snapshot schedules, replication policies, and backup/restore operations to ensure strict recovery point and time objectives.
• Lifecycle Management: Plan capacity, reclaim unused storage, and assist in non-disruptive firmware updates and hardware expansions.
• Automation: Write and maintain scripts (e.g., Python, Bash, PowerShell) to automate routine provisioning and capacity reporting.

Senior Level

Architecture & Engineering

• Design, build, and scale highly resilient enterprise SAN, NAS, and distributed object storage infrastructures across hybrid on-premise and multi-cloud environments.
• Formulate long-term storage capacity planning and lifecycle management strategies tied to business continuity and global data growth.
• Evaluate and integrate bleeding-edge software-defined storage (SDS) and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) architectures to eliminate performance bottlenecks.

Operations & Advanced Troubleshooting

• Spearhead Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and resolve Tier 3/escalated incidents related to multi-vendor storage arrays, high-performance computing (HPC) parallel file systems, and Fiber Channel (FC) interconnection fabrics.
• Perform extreme-level storage and IOPS performance tuning to optimize database and virtual machine storage network traffic.
• Administer, zone, and configure complex SAN topologies (e.g., Brocade/Cisco MDS) and enterprise NAS systems (e.g., Pure Storage, NetApp DataONTAP).

Data Protection, DR & Automation

• Architect and test multi-site disaster recovery (DR) architectures, focusing on synchronous/asynchronous replication, malware-resilient immutable snapshots, and synthetic backup pipelines (e.g., Rubrik, Commvault).
• Create infrastructure-as-code (IaC) solutions and automation scripts (via Python, Ansible, or Terraform) for routine provisioning, auditing, and reporting.
• Enforce strict Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and data security/governance policies to meet regulatory requirements.

SME Level

• Architectural Design & Engineering: Design multi-petabyte unified storage architectures (SAN, NAS, Object, and NVMe-oF) that balance cost, capacity, and IOPS to meet strict enterprise service-level agreements.
• Automation & Orchestration: Engineer Infrastructure as Code (IaC) pipelines utilizing APIs, Python, and REST to automate LUN provisioning, zoning, and capacity tiering.
• Resiliency & Data Protection: Design continuous replication strategies, active-active datacenter mirroring (e.g., SRDF/Metro), and immutable, air-gapped backup vaulting for comprehensive ransomware mitigation.
• Performance Tuning & Analytics: Perform deep-packet and protocol-level (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, SMB) troubleshooting to eliminate I/O bottlenecks in hyper-converged and highly virtualized host environments.
• Lifecycle Management & Capacity Planning: Direct predictive analytics and capacity modeling to drive hardware refresh cycles, cloud tiering, and data lifecycle management.
• Compliance & Security: Enforce Zero Trust security postures by implementing storage-level encryption at rest/in-flight, RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), and STIGs across classified and unclassified domains.

Requirements

All roles require an active TS/SCI with Poly.

Entry Level

• Education: High School Diploma/GED with 4 years of relevant experience, Associate’s Degree with 2 years of relevant experience, or Bachelor’s Degree with 0 years of relevant experience.
• Technical Knowledge: Basic understanding of networking, operating systems (Linux/Windows), and virtual environments (VMware).
• Soft Skills: Strong attention to detail, eagerness to learn enterprise storage concepts, and good communication skills for collaborating with other IT teams.

Junior Level

• Education: High School Diploma/GED with 6 years of relevant experience, Associate’s Degree with 4 years of relevant experience, Bachelor’s Degree with 2 years of relevant experience, or Master’s Degree with 0 years of relevant experience.
• Technical Knowledge: Basic understanding of Storage Area Networks (SAN), Network-Attached Storage (NAS), and RAID configurations.
• Collaboration: Ability to work alongside systems administrators, database administrators, and network engineers to resolve infrastructure incidents.

Mid-Level

• Education: High School Diploma/GED with 8 years of relevant experience, Associate’s Degree with 6 years of relevant experience, Bachelor’s Degree with 4 years of relevant experience, Master’s Degree with 2 years of relevant experience, or PhD with 0 years of relevant experience.
• Storage Protocols: Deep understanding of SAN (FC, iSCSI) and NAS (NFS, SMB) protocols.
• Operating Systems: Solid foundational knowledge of Linux, Windows Server, and hypervisors (e.g., VMware vSphere) to effectively troubleshoot storage mounting and connectivity.
• Backup Solutions: Familiarity with enterprise backup architectures (e.g., Veeam, Commvault, or Avamar).
• Scripting: Basic to intermediate proficiency in Python, Bash, or PowerShell.

Senior Level

• Education: High School Diploma/GED with 10 years of relevant experience, Associate’s Degree with 8 years of relevant experience, Bachelor’s Degree with 6 years of relevant experience, Master’s Degree with 4 years of relevant experience, or PhD with 2 years of relevant experience.
• Deep Domain Knowledge: Exceptional troubleshooting capability within complex multi-vendor ecosystems (e.g., EMC, IBM, NetApp, Pure Storage).
• Certifications: Industry-standard architect-level credentials are highly preferred (e.g., NetApp Certified Data Administrator/Architect, EMCIE, SNIA Certified Storage Architect).

SME Level

• Education: High School Diploma/GED with 12 years of relevant experience, Associate’s Degree with 10 years of relevant experience, Bachelor’s Degree with 8 years of relevant experience, Master’s Degree with 6 years of relevant experience, or PhD with 4 years of relevant experience.
• Domain Expertise: Deep hands-on proficiency with tier-1 arrays (e.g., Pure Storage, Dell PowerMax/Unity, NetApp ONTAP, IBM FlashSystem) and data protection platforms (e.g., Rubrik, Commvault, Veeam).
• Protocol & Fabrics: Mastery of Fibre Channel (FC) SAN fabric routing, NVMe, and enterprise NAS protocols.
• Cloud & Virtualization: Exceptional understanding of storage integration with VMware vSphere, Kubernetes persistent volumes, and native cloud storage services.

Pay

A reasonable estimate of the current range for this role in the U.S. is $89,600.00 - $204,000.00.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Comprehensive insurance options
• Matching contributions through the 401(k) plan and the share purchase plan
• Paid time off for vacation, holidays, and sick time
• Paid parental leave
• Learning opportunities and tuition assistance
• Wellness and well-being programs