• Senior System Administrator

    TISTA Science and Technology (Austin, TX)


    Overview

     

    Are you a Senior Systems Administrator who would like to have a positive impact for millions of people? If so, we may have an opportunity for you!

     

    TISTA associates enjoy above Industry Healthcare Benefits, Remote Working Options, Paid Time Off, Training/Certification opportunities, Healthcare Savings Account & Flexible Savings Account, Paid Life Insurance, Short-term & Long-term Disability, 401K Match, Tuition Reimbursement, Employee Assistance Program, Paid Holidays, Military Leave, and much more!

    Responsibilities

    The Senior System Administrator/Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)in the VA’s Enterprise Cloud is responsible for ensuring the resilience, performance, reliability, and compliance of mission-critical cloud services that support Veterans and VA stakeholders. This role bridges software engineering, systems engineering, and operations to deliver highly available, secure, and efficient cloud-based platforms aligned with VA’s modernization strategy and federal compliance mandates, with a focus on reliability, performance, scalability, and automation. Though day-to-day tasks vary, depending on the various organizations and their systems, generally this role’s daily work cadence follows these categories:

     

    + Proactively monitor system health, availability, and performance using observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk).

    + Respond to alerts and incidents, triage issues, and perform root cause analysis (RCA).

    + Lead on-call rotations to ensure 24/7 uptime and quick recovery from outages.

    + Document incident reports and contribute to postmortems to prevent recurrence.

    + Automate manual operational tasks such as deployments, scaling, and configuration using tools like Ansible, Terraform, or Puppet.

    + Manage infrastructure as code (IaC) to ensure consistency across environments.

    + Optimize CI/CD pipelines for reliable and repeatable software delivery.

    + Build self-healing systems to minimize downtime.

    + Conduct load and stress testing to validate system performance under peak demand.

    + Establish and enforce Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

    + Identify and reduce sources of latency, bottlenecks, and single points of failure.

    + Work with development teams to design reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance into customer servers.

    + Patch operating systems, containers, and dependencies to address vulnerabilities.

    + Ensure compliance with organizational and regulatory requirements.

    + Implement access controls, secrets management, and least privileged principles.

    + Monitor resource utilization (CPU, memory, storage, network) to anticipate scaling needs.

    + Plan for growth by forecasting demand and preparing infrastructure accordingly.

    + Optimize cloud costs by rightsizing instances, using autoscaling, and leveraging reserved/spot instances.

    + Partner with software engineers to embed reliability practices into development.

    + Mentor teams on best practices for observability, automation, and incident handling.

    + Participate in blameless postmortems and contribute to knowledge-sharing sessions.

    + Continuously evaluate new tools and technologies to improve system reliability.

    + Design, monitor, and maintain Customer Servers to meet VA’s 99.9%+ uptime and SLA requirements across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

    + Implement fault-tolerant and self-healing architectures leveraging automation.

    + Develop and manage observability frameworks (logging, metrics, tracing) to detect, respond to, and remediate incidents quickly.

    + Lead blameless postmortems and drive corrective actions to strengthen VAEC resilience.

    + Engineer scalable automation pipelines for provisioning, patching, and compliance (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, GitHub Actions).

    + Reduce manual effort through self-service tools for operations teams.

    + Monitor and optimize application and infrastructure performance to meet demand from VA Medical Centers, Enterprise Data Warehouses, and end users.

    + Ensure latency, throughput, and resource utilization align with mission needs.

    + Integrate VA 6500, NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, and Zero Trust requirements into daily operations.

    + Partner with cybersecurity teams to enforce continuous ATO (cATO) practices and vulnerability remediation.

    + Collaborate with Release Management, Engineering, and Operations teams to improve change management, deployment pipelines, and reliability practices.

    + Drive the adoption of SRE principles (error budgets, SLIs, SLOs, SLAs) into VA’s IT Service Management (ITSM) processes.

    + Operate across VA’s Enterprise Cloud (VAEC), on-premises data centers, and hybrid platforms, ensuring seamless integration and interoperability.

    + Support workloads across AWS GovCloud, Microsoft Azure Government, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) where applicable.

    + Mission Assurance: Continuous availability of systems supporting Veterans’ health, benefits, and administrative services.

    + Operational Efficiency: Automated and standardized cloud operations reduce manual risk and speed delivery.

    + Compliance Assurance: Alignment with VA 6500, NIST, and federal mandates, minimizing audit risks.

    + Veteran-Centered Reliability: Ensure services that Veterans depend on are consistently reliable, secure, and performant.

    Qualifications

    + 5 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Systems Engineering

    + Strong experience with Linux/Unix systems administration and troubleshooting

    + Proficient with cloud platforms (AWS and/or Azure), especially in deploying

    + Production workloads

    + Deep understanding of monitoring, metrics, alerting, and observability

    + Proficient in designing, implementing, and managing automation solutions using Ansible

    + Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps)

    + Hands-on with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, AKS)

    + Familiarity with networking concepts (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, VPCs, load balancing)

    + Solid understanding of software development lifecycle (SDLC) and Agile methodologies

    + Comfortable participating in on-call rotations and handling high-priority incidents

    Preferred Qualifications (optional but preferred):

    + AWS Certified SysOps Administrator or DevOps Engineer

    + Linux Certified: Azure Administrator or DevOps Engineer Expert

    + Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)

    + Experience in chaos engineering, capacity modeling, or SRE tooling

    + Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills

    + Ability to work in cross-functional teams and communicate effectively with developers, operations, and leadership

    + A strong bias for automation and self-healing systems

    + Ownership mindset with a commitment to reliability and continuous improvement

    Education:

    + Bachelor’s degree in computer science, electronics engineering or related technical discipline and 5+ years’ work experience

    + Eight (8) years of additional relevant experience may be substituted for education (13 years total)

    Clearance:

    + The ability to pass a Tier 4/HIGH Background Investigation

    Location:

    + Department of Veteran's Affairs (100% On-site)

    + Monday - Friday (8:00 AM - 4:30 PM EST Time)

    + Austin Information Technology Center (AITC)

     

    1615 Woodward Street,

     

    Austin, TX 78741