Network Engineer III (Systems Engineer)

About the Department
The Information Technology Services Department is responsible for enterprise technology operations for the City of Alexandria. ITS provides technology services and solutions to City departments to enhance service delivery. ITS aligns its work with City needs by providing leadership, resources, expertise, and products that enable departments to better serve the City's residents, businesses, and visitors. ITS resources support initiatives funded through the multi-year Information Technology Capital Improvement Plan (IT/CIP) to improve the overall technology landscape. The City of Alexandria's ITS Department has been a Top Ten National Finalist in the Digital Cities Award program for the past 13 consecutive years.

An Overview
The Department of Information Technology Services (ITS) is seeking a Network Engineer III (Systems Engineer) who will have responsibility for optimizing and enhancing the City of Alexandria government’s Hybrid Infrastructure Program. This technical lead position reports directly to the Technology Program Manager (Server Infrastructure) and uses industry best practices in the design, implementation, and management of all server infrastructure technologies as directed by the Chief Information Officer, and enforces the City’s data storage and virtual infrastructure through design, configuration, implementation, and continuous improvement systems engineering and DevOps concepts. The Network Engineer III (Storage Engineer) will also contribute in selecting, configuring, communicating, and implementing automation and orchestration solutions to measure performance and reduce IT risk and cost.

What You Should Bring
You should have a demonstrated ability of being able to work independently, as well as a history of establishing and maintaining effective working relationships with coworkers, representatives of other departments and agencies, and the public. You must be able to communicate clearly and effectively, both verbally and in writing, as well as being able to mentor junior staff. You should be able to show proactivity in continuously improving your job knowledge and technical and functional skills through training opportunities and self-study. Our ideal candidate will have considerable hands-on experience developing, maintaining, supporting, and optimizing key functional areas of server infrastructure, network infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, data storage and communications while successfully leading and managing related requests and projects.

The Opportunity
As a Network Engineer III (Systems Engineer), your effort will be focused on all aspects of City-wide IT Hybrid Infrastructure, from developing server and cloud infrastructure processes and orchestration workflows to optimize the value of investments in server and storage infrastructure. Examples of duties include:

Strategy & Planning

• Participate in and support capacity planning and development of long-term strategic goals for systems and software in conjunction with data owners and department managers.
• Work closely with information security, network engineering, service desk, business application, and database administration to develop scalable, maintainable, consistent, highly available storage architectures that meet business objectives and set relevant service-level agreements.
• Perform capacity planning analysis and other needs assessments to inform storage architecture strategy.
• Design redundant systems and policies for disaster recovery and archiving to ensure effective protection and integrity of storage appliances and stored data assets.
• Develop procedures for backups and restores, as well as monitor the performance, success, or failure of these tasks.
• Define, communicate, and ensure adherence to data storage retention policies and create routines for end-users to facilitate storage best practices.
• Develop and maintain procedures for storage change management, availability management, backup management, incident management, and process documentation.
• Develop and maintain testing process for current, new, and modified storage appliances and software.
• Maintain current knowledge of storage-related laws, trends, and issues, including current and emerging technologies and best practices. Develop strategies and policies to ensure best-practice based regulatory compliance and reduce the enterprise’s legal exposure.
• Justify expenditures on storage solutions through business cases, and ROI/TCO calculations.

Acquisition & Deployment

• Manage the purchase, installation, and configuration of new and existing storage and backup devices and corresponding software.
• Oversee storage allocation to business units across the enterprise based on established requirements, available disk space, and future growth.
• Establish and maintain appropriate end-user access control levels for stored data.

Operational Management

• Ensure IT adherence to service level agreements regarding storage allocations, limitations, and availability.
• Anticipate, identify, and oversee mitigation and response to storage access problems, retrieval issues, and storage device status issues.
• Ensure that information storage and retention measures and equipment adhere to all applicable laws and regulations. Recommend and implement changes where necessary.
• Analyze storage systems performance, collect information, and prepare summary reports.
• Continuously assess server infrastructure for process improvements including virtual machine provisioning and performance monitoring.
• Design, deploy, cross-train, adhere and enforce, contribute to server baseline configuration and automated provisioning process improvements.
• Develop, document, and maintain policies, procedures and associated training plans for storage & backup administration and appropriate use.
• Perform regular backup and storage performance audits to ensure adherence to stated data recovery time and recovery point objectives.
• Perform and test routine system backups and restores.
• Contribute to configuring networks, subnets, and firewall rules for both Azure and/or on-premises infrastructure.
• Contribute to continuous integrations and enhancements with Splunk, Nagios, and other monitoring and alerting tools.
• Provide guidance to junior members of the team.
• Investigating and recommending innovative technologies that reduce IT risk and provide potential cost savings for the City.
• Performing other duties as assigned.

Minimum & Additional Requirements

Four-Year College Degree; five or more years of experience in storage and backup technologies and advanced network and server support, Ethernet routing switches, web filtering, bandwidth management, Quality of Service (QOS) techniques, Wireless AP's and Security switch devices that include SSL-VPN & IPSEC VPN; considerable working knowledge of network troubleshooting techniques; at least three years of experience in the design and configuration of Voice over IP (VoIP) networking; at least three years of experience in the design, configuration and operation of DHCP & DNS networking services; at least three years of experience in Internet backbone connectivity; or any equivalent combination of experience and training which provides the required knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Preferred Qualifications

Minimum three (3) years of technical experience in Enterprise Storage Administration, Backup Administration, and/or DevOps. Demonstrated understanding of tools and technologies with a preference for VMWare, Azure, and AWS. Two (2) years direct technical experience with Infrastructure Automation (Puppet, Chef, Ansible), Deployment Automation; or any equivalent combination of experience and training which provides the required knowledge, skills, and abilities. History of building process and repeatability into your work products. Recent technical experience within the past five years demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge of DevOps and IT infrastructure administration and technology (audit compliance, regulatory compliance, business continuity and disaster recovery, configuration management, virtual computing and automation and orchestration of infrastructure and network resources using common industry orchestration tools, technology, and methodologies). Demonstrated progressive technical experience, responsibility, and industry knowledge of two (2) or more of Citrix, Linux/Unix products, Ansible, VMWare products. Recent experience within the past five (5) years demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge of information protection standards, guidelines, and applied procedures (i.e., industry "best practices"). Three (3) years demonstrated knowledge and experience with continual adherence and application of information security best practices aligned with system administration. Technical experience within the past 5-7 years demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge of server, cloud, and automation administration as applied with DevOps concepts and best practices for gained efficiencies. Experience within the past 10 years demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge of business needs coupled with the ability to establish and maintain a high level of customer trust and confidence in the server and system design and delivery. Professional certifications a plus and should be noted.

Notes

This position requires the successful completion of pre-employment checks including but not limited to a criminal background and drug screening. This position may be occasionally required to be available after normal working hours to support applications and to respond to the City’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) when it is activated.