Cloud System Administrator

Cloud System Administrator (Annapolis Junction, MD)

Active TS/SCI w/Polygraph REQUIRED Please do not apply if you do not currently possess this level of clearance.

Telework:
None

Position Overview

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Cloud & Distributed Systems Engineer to support mission-critical, cloud-based data repositories serving thousands of Intelligence Community users. This role operates in a dynamic, high-tempo operational environment where requirements evolve rapidly in response to global events. The selected candidate will administer and engineer large-scale Hadoop and Accumulo clusters, ensure system reliability and security, and collaborate across infrastructure, networking, and security domains to maintain continuous mission availability.

This is not a traditional system administration role — it is a reliability-focused distributed systems engineering position operating at scale.

Education & Experience

• Minimum 3 years experience administering large distributed systems (as defined above)
• 7 years Linux systems administration experience
• 5 years scripting experience
• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or related field highly desired o May substitute for two (2) years of experience

Primary Responsibilities

• Monitor system health, performance, and reliability across large, distributed clusters
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex hardware, software, network, and cloud platform issues
• Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and contribute to post-incident reviews
• Maintain and optimize large-scale Hadoop and Accumulo environments
• Administer and maintain distributed storage systems
• Engineer and improve monitoring, observability, and alerting frameworks
• Participate in architecture and engineering design discussions
• Create and maintain automation scripts and Infrastructure-as-Code deployments
• Patch, upgrade, and harden systems in accordance with security compliance standards
• Administer LDAP-based user and group accounts
• Maintain hardware inventory and asset tracking
• Provide after-hours on-call support in a mission-driven environment
• Interface with hardware, network, infrastructure, and security teams

Required Technical Qualifications

Linux Systems Administration (7+ Years)

• Deep understanding of Linux operating systems and internals
• User and group account management (LDAP)
• Configuration and administration of DHCP, DNS, and TFTP
• System patching, upgrades, and security hardening
• Performance tuning and resource optimization

Experience supporting large distributed systems consisting of

• Multiple clusters
• Clusters spanning at least three racks
• Minimum of 60 nodes per site

Experience with

• Hadoop (HDFS, YARN tuning)
• Accumulo (tablet balancing, performance optimization)
• Cassandra, Scality, Swift, Gluster, Lustre, GPFS, Amazon S3, or comparable technologies

Cloud & Container Technologies

• Kubernetes orchestration services (CKA-level knowledge preferred)
• Docker containerization and image management
• Helm charts and cluster configuration
• Stateful Sets and persistent volume management
• Cloud-based storage architectures

Automation & Infrastructure as Code

• 5+ years scripting in Bash, Python, or Perl
• Puppet
• Ansible
• Salt
• Terraform or Cloud Formation
• CI/CD pipeline integration and Git-based workflows

Observability & Reliability Engineering

• Prometheus / Grafana
• ELK / Open Search
• Splunk
• Cloud-native monitoring platforms
• Design and tuning of alerting frameworks
• Experience defining and supporting SLAs/SLOs
• Incident response participation and documentation
• Capacity planning and performance analysis

Networking & Infrastructure

• Understanding of VLANs, port channel bonding, and Layer 2/Layer 3 interactions
• TCP/IP troubleshooting
• Load balancing (F5, HAProxy, NGINX)
• Firewall rule management
• Network performance analysis

Storage &…