Senior Infrastructure Engineer - Active Directory

Our Columbus, Ohio client is growing their infrastructure team and has a contract-to-hire opportunity for a Senior Infrastructure Engineer - Active Directory who will design and operate Active Directory and hybrid identity, partner on cloud identity patterns, and be the person both engineers and leadership rely on when authentication is on the line

.This role requires deep expertise in AD DS, Group Policy, DNS/DHCP, PKI alignment, replication, and hybrid identity integration—Zero Trust architecture instincts and the security depth to back them up. You'll serve as the technical leader for identity operations and collaborate closely with security, cloud, application, and infrastructure peer

• ory Design, implement, and maintain Active Directory (sites, replication, OU/GPO models, trust relationships) and closely coupled services (DNS, DHCP) with clear standards and change contr
• ol.
  
  Implement and evolve hybrid identity patterns (for example Microsoft Entra  / Connect, hybrid join, federation concepts, conditional access alignment) in partnership with security and cloud tea
• AD.Lead recovery and forest/domain health scenarios with documented playbooks and measurable recovery objectiv

• ons Design and maintain hybrid infrastructure spanning on-premises and cloud platforms, with identity as the integration layer across workloa
• ds.
  
  Operate and support VMware ESXi and vCenter environments that host directory-related and dependent workloa
• ds.
  
  Support enterprise storage (SAN/NAS) for performance, redundancy, and recoverability of identity and infrastructure servic
• es.
  
  Collaborate with the Citrix team to ensure AD authentication, GPO policies, and session delivery integration are correctly configured—you influence identity behavior here, not platform administrati
• on.
  
  Manage enterprise backup and recovery for critical identity and infrastructure targets; validate restores and retention against poli
• cy.
  
  Perform routine maintenance, upgrades, and patching across servers, virtualization, and cloud-connected systems with minimal customer impa

• ent Evaluate and optimize resource utilization across on-premises and cloud platfor
• ms.
  
  Recommend and implement cost-aware strategies for compute, storage, and cloud consumpti
• on.
  
  Analyze trends and propose improvements that increase service efficiency and availabili

• ent Drive security hardening across AD, servers, virtualization, and connected cloud services—including Tiered Administration (PAW model), LAPS deployment, and Microsoft Defender for Identity for real-time threat detection across the directo
• ry.
  
  Monitor and remediate vulnerabilities through patching, configuration management, and risk mitigation aligned to SL
• As.Maintain compliance with corporate policies, audit requirements, and industry standar

• ort Serve as a senior escalation point for infrastructure incidents and problems with an identity-centric le
• ns.
  
  Lead technical root cause analysis and implement durable corrective actio
• ns.
  
  Mentor junior engineers and contribute to infrastructure engineering standards and patter
• ns.
  
  Participate in planning and executing major projects, migrations, and deploymen

• ion Monitor performance across servers, virtualization, storage, and cloud services; conduct capacity planning for compute, storage, and network resourc
• es.
  
  Implement monitoring and alerting for proactive detection of directory and platform issu
• es.
  
  Create and maintain technical documentation, diagrams, build guides, SOPs, and compliance evidence; report on health, performance, and postu

• ent Partner with application, security, cloud, and networking teams for end-to-end solutio
• ns.
  
  Work with business stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable, supportable desig
• ns.
  
  Communicate clearly to technical and non-technical audienc

ing Identity environments generate rich signals—replication events,…