System Admin Engineer

The System Administrator Engineer is a hands‑on platform operations and systems engineering role responsible for the reliability, security, performance, and lifecycle management of environments supporting VA Profile, VADIR/VIS, and HDR within the MDM Product Platform. You’ll enable delivery of complex MDM epics by standing up and maintaining CI/CD‑enabled infrastructure; hardening, patching, and monitoring systems; automating deployments; enforcing compliance (e.g., HIPAA, NIST/FISMA, FedRAMP);

and resolving cross‑team dependencies for agile delivery.

You serve as the operational backbone for MDM Solution Teams—translating solution intent into stable environments, ensuring data availability (with Data Hydration), and partnering with Release & Compliance to keep systems audit‑ready and Veteran‑focused.

What You Will Work On

Platform Operations & Environment Management

• Provision, configure, harden, and maintain environments (dev/test/stage/prod) for VA Profile, VADIR/VIS, HDR, and related MDM components.
• Administer OS, containers/orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes/Open Shift), application servers, databases, message queues, and integration gateways per Architecture patterns.
• Implement automated configuration management and infrastructure‑as‑code (IaC) for repeatable, compliant environment builds.

Epic Elaboration Support & Solution Design Enablement

• Participate in epic elaboration to translate solution intent into infrastructure requirements (scalability, performance, data flows, security controls).
• Collaborate with the Architecture Team and Product SME to ensure platform configurations align with MDM data models and domain‑specific constraints.

CI/CD, Release Management & Automation

• Own CI/CD pipeline operation and improvements (build/deploy automation, test orchestration, artifact management, rollback strategies).
• Manage releases across Agile Release Trains (ARTs) in coordination with the RTE, ensuring change control, approvals, and runbooks are complete and accurate.

Security, Compliance & Risk Management

• Implement and maintain controls aligned to HIPAA (for HDR), NIST 80053, FISMA, FedRAMP, and VA security directives.
• Administer identity/access (RBAC, least privilege), secrets management, patch management, vulnerability scanning, and audit logging.
• Partner with Release & Compliance and Security Lead for POA&Ms, audit artifacts, and continuous control monitoring.

Observability, Performance & SRE Practices

• Instrument systems for end‑to‑end observability (metrics, logs, traces), define SLOs/SLIs, and manage alerting.
• Perform capacity planning, performance tuning, and resilience testing (failover, DR runbooks, backup/restore validation).

Data Hydration & Integration Enablement

• Coordinate with the Data Hydration Team to ensure data sourcing, enrichment, and synchronization pipelines have stable endpoints, sufficient throughput, and correct access policies.
• Validate data availability, latency, and lineage requirements for downstream reporting and decision support.

Prototyping & Modeling Support

• Stand up sandbox/prototype environments to validate early solution designs, test integrations, and prove feasibility with Development Scrum Teams and Decision Support Reporting.
• Create and maintain operational models (deployment topology, access flows, data movement diagrams).

Agile Delivery & Cross-Team Collaboration

• Support feature/story development with clear operational acceptance criteria and definition of done.
• Identify and manage dependencies, risks, and blockers across solution teams.
• Provide transparent status reporting to the RTE, Product Manager, and program leadership.

What You Will Bring

Required Qualifications

• 5–8+ years in systems administration or platform engineering for mission‑critical applications (on‑prem and/or cloud).
• Hands‑on with Linux/Windows administration, networks, storage, certificates/PKI, and RBAC.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (e.g., Azure Dev Ops, Git Lab CI, Jenkins), artifact repositories, and pipeline security.
• Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (Ansible/Terraform/Groovy/Helm) and scripting (Bash, Power Shell, Python).
• Strong knowledge of security/compliance frameworks relevant to U.S. federal…