Senior System Administrator

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!

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.

• 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