Systems Engineer, Infrastructure Virtualization

Overview

Simple sense builds, deploys, and sustains the Installation Resilience Platform that enables mission operators to rapidly adapt and respond. The Platform protects critical infrastructure from cyber attack while unlocking previously siloed information to monitor, diagnose, and improve response times to incidents. Our adversaries rapidly adopt the latest technology: we help defense users respond in kind. Simple sense is a non-traditional defense contractor and prime on the Air Force's Installation Resilience Operations Command and Control (IROC) program.

We are expanding to five additional Air Force, Space Force, and Army installations from the prototype installation, Tyndall Air Force Base. Our team combines deep mission experience with technical expertise in Dev Sec Ops , cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure to design for scale and long-term sustainability.

Simple sense is looking for an Infrastructure Virtualization Systems Engineer to join our remote, US-based team. In this role, you will be responsible for designing, deploying, and supporting VMware vSphere virtualization solutions within our Installation Resilience Platform and internal infrastructure. You will lead the implementation of small-to-medium scale vSphere environments on enterprise hardware to support mission-critical workloads and core services. This role is based in the Denver Metro area with a hybrid onsite schedule and potential travel for team meetings or on-site support.

• Develop Virtualization Architecture:
  Create scalable and secure infrastructure designs that ensure high availability and performance, provide subject matter expert support, and document solutions for deployment teams.
• Deployment:
  Design, deploy and maintain small-to-medium scale VMware vSphere environments to support mission-critical workloads. Configure ESXi hosts, vCenter Server, virtual networks, and shared storage (vSAN or SAN) to create secure, highly available clusters that meet performance and capacity requirements.
• Infrastructure Automation:
  Develop and use Infrastructure-as-Code templates and automation scripts to manage the virtualization infrastructure. Use tools like Ansible (or Power
  
  CLI/Power Shell) and Bash/Python scripting to automate VM provisioning, ESXi host configuration, patch management, and environment build-out.
• Monitoring & Reliability:
  Set up observability for the virtualization stack to track system performance, capacity, and failures. Implement monitoring and alerting for host and VM metrics and critical logs. Proactively tune resources and configurations to improve reliability and coordinate incident response for virtualization-related outages or performance issues.
• Security Hardening & Compliance:
  Implement security best practices and required compliance standards on all virtualization components. Apply DISA STIGs and other hardening guidelines to ESXi hosts and vCenter configurations. Ensure proper network segmentation, RBAC in vCenter, and encryption where applicable. Remediate vulnerabilities and maintain DoD cybersecurity compliance.
• Collaboration:
  
  Work with software engineers, vendor SMEs, system administrators, cybersecurity analysts, and operations teams to align virtualization infrastructure with application needs and security policies. Lead deployment of new virtualization solutions and document configurations, topology, and standard operating procedures. Provide knowledge transfer and training to the operations team.

• 5+ years of professional experience in IT infrastructure or systems engineering, including hands-on design and management of virtualization environments in production.
• Strong experience deploying, administering, and maintaining VMware virtualization platforms (vSphere/ESXi and vCenter) in on-premises data centers. Ability to configure clusters (HA/DRS), virtual networking, and storage for high availability and performance.
• Familiarity with software-defined storage and hyperconverged infrastructure: experience with VMware vSAN or similar technologies for clustering storage.
• Experience with enterprise server hardware for virtualization (e.g., Cisco UCS, Dell VxRail/Power…