Systems Specialist II

About Us

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is one of the largest, most complex agencies in the state, and has approximately 17,000 employees. It is responsible for ensuring the health, safety, and well-being of all North Carolinians, providing human service needs for special populations including individuals who are deaf, blind, developmentally disabled, and mentally ill, and helping poor North Carolinians achieve economic independence.

Department of Health and Human Services

SEC OFFICE - INFO TECH - NC FAST

Applications Systems Specialist II (NS)

DT11

This position serves as the Cloud Operations Lead responsible for provisioning and administering enterprise-grade AWS infrastructure supporting complex information technology applications across DHHS. Operating in a hybrid data center environment, this role ensures continuous system availability, drives automation and optimization, and ensures compliance with security and privacy standards. The position requires technical leadership in areas such as server management, database support, and infrastructure troubleshooting, and plays a vital role in supporting operational needs and emergency response scenarios.

Key duties span infrastructure deployment, team guidance, and cross-functional collaboration within a mission-critical IT environment.

• Provision and maintain enterprise-grade AWS infrastructure to support large-scale IT applications.
• Drive automation and orchestration of cloud infrastructure using IaC and CI/CD tools.
• Troubleshoot AWS infrastructure and resolve operational issues to ensure high availability.
• Plan, review, and deploy patches and upgrades in mixed (Windows/Linux) AWS environments.
• Address platform and infrastructure-related audit findings in collaboration with internal teams.
• Lead operational cost optimization and cloud performance tuning initiatives.
• Coordinate with internal teams on infrastructure planning and compliance alignment.
• Provide technical guidance to operations staff and set team priorities.
• Support incident response and resolution for cloud production issues.
• Ensure alignment with security and privacy requirements in all operational practices.

• Demonstrated experience with provisioning and managing AWS infrastructure for large-scale applications.
• Experience scripting in Python, Bash, or Power Shell for automation.
• Experience with infrastructure automation tools such as Terraform, Cloud Formation, or Ansible.
• Experience managing AWS services, including EC2, S3, VPC/Subnet, Messaging, and RDS.
• Experience supporting cloud environments with a focus on operational stability and compliance.

Salary Grade Range: $91,600 – $160,299. Employees participate in health insurance options, standard and supplemental retirement plans, the NCFlex program, paid vacation, sick and community service leave, and paid parental leave.

The State of North Carolina is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer and is dedicated to providing employees with a work environment free from all forms of unlawful employment discrimination, harassment, or retaliation. The state provides reasonable accommodation to employees and applicants with disabilities; known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions; and for religious beliefs, observances, and practices.

Talent Acquisition: talent acquisition.gov