Senior Engineer, Virtualization

AHEAD is searching for a Senior Virtualization Engineer to be a part of our Managed Services team. Candidates will be primarily responsible for the overall health, stability, security, performance, and lifecycle management of virtualization and compute platforms in our managed services customer environments. Candidates will serve as a senior member of the Managed Services Virtualization team, providing tier 3 technical leadership for virtualization technologies, complex incidents, platform improvements, and customer outcomes. The role participates in 24x7 operations and an on-call rotation. The ideal candidate should be customer focused, an effective communicator, self-initiating, accountable, and able to perform most tasks without direct oversight.

Principle Duties and Responsibilities

• Provide enterprise-level operational support for incident, problem, change, request, and event-management activities
• Lead complex and escalated virtualization incidents, including high-risk, recurring, cross-domain, vendor-dependent, and platform-impacting issues
• Provide technical leadership during P1 incidents by assessing impact, coordinating technical actions, documenting risks and decisions, and driving resolution through closure
• Serve as a subject matter expert and escalation point for virtualization and compute technologies, addressing technical events and requests needing additional resources or urgent attention
• Assess customer environments for performance, capacity, configuration, design, resilience, security, and supportability issues; propose and implement resolutions
• Provide architectural oversight and validate that proposed changes, designs, and remediation plans align with vendor-supported practices, client standards, capacity, resiliency, security, and service scope
• Work across networking, storage, operating-system, security, monitoring, automation, and application teams to troubleshoot complex infrastructure issues
• Work with vendors and hardware partners to resolve virtualization and compute issues, coordinate escalations, and implement supported resolutions
• Own or contribute to problem-management records, corrective actions, preventive actions, post-incident reviews, and technical root-cause analyses for recurring or systemic issues
• Lead or support platform lifecycle activities, including upgrade readiness, compatibility validation, capacity planning, end-of-support and end-of-life assessments, patch planning, firmware coordination, and VCF lifecycle management
• Maintain accurate client architecture, access, configuration, monitoring, hardware, firmware, inventory, and maintenance documentation. Reconcile documentation against authoritative platform, CMDB, monitoring, and inventory sources
• Ensure that clients' infrastructure is healthy, stable, secure, documented, and configured with accepted technical best practices
• Perform recurring operational-risk reviews and identify opportunities to improve platform stability, supportability, monitoring coverage, security posture, automation, and service consistency
• Support annual architecture, capacity, lifecycle, and standard-operating-procedure reviews, and provide technical inputs for quarterly business reviews or other strategic client reviews
• Own the technical execution of assigned client onboarding and offboarding activities, including access validation, monitoring coverage, vendor access, initial documentation, known-issue identification, and EoS/EoL review
• Provide clear technical context, risk, impact, dependencies, recommended actions, and next steps to Client Success Managers and customer technical contacts. Business-impacting or scope-related customer communications should be coordinated through the appropriate Client Success Manager
• Participate in 24x7 operations and the on-call rotation, including major incidents and planned maintenance activities as scheduled
• Complete training and certification as assigned to further skills and knowledge
• Mentor L2 engineers, improve escalation quality, review technical work when assigned, and contribute to standards, runbooks, knowledge articles, training, and continuous-improvement initiatives

Qualifications/ Technology Experience

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (Unique education, specialized experience, skills, knowledge, training, or certification may be substituted)
• 10+ yrs of experience with virtualization technologies and enterprise infrastructure operations
• Experience with VMware vSphere/VVF required
• Experience with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) required
• Experience with Nutanix AHV required
• Experience with Microsoft Hyper-V preferred
• Experience with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, including virtual-machine lifecycle management, networking, storage integration, and operational troubleshooting
• 5+ years of hands-on experience with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment, configuration, lifecycle management, and operational support
• Proficiency in VCF lifecycle management, including automated deployment, patching, and upgrades using SDDC Manager
• Experience with VCF workload domains, including VI workload domains and NSX-T network virtualization
• Knowledge of VCF validated designs and reference architectures for hybrid-cloud implementations
• Experience with VCF integration with public-cloud services (VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution, Google Cloud VMware Engine) preferred
• Experience with VCF's automated deployment and configuration of vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and vRealize Suite or Aria components
• Demonstrated ability to manage converged infrastructure through VCF's unified platform spanning compute, storage, networking, and security
• 10+ yrs of experience with operational administration of enterprise IT systems
• 10+ yrs of experience with performance and infrastructure monitoring tools (LogicMonitor, Elastic, or comparable platforms)
• 5+ yrs of experience with an enterprise ITSM system. ServiceNow preferred
• Experience with Cisco UCS and Dell hardware systems required
• Familiarity with Dell PowerFlex/PowerStore/VxRail preferred
• Operating System skills with Windows and Linux preferred
• Understanding of PowerShell and PowerCLI with ability to create and utilize scripts for administration, troubleshooting, reporting, and automation required
• Managed Services or consulting experience required
• VMware Certified Professional certification required; VMware Certified Advanced Professional certification preferred
• ITILv4 certification preferred

Qualifications: Soft Skills

• Advanced technical troubleshooting and problem-solving capabilities
• Approach projects, changes, and problems with a “security first” mindset
• Superior customer service and training skills
• Possess a strong sense of urgency and ability to set priorities during normal operations and high-impact events
• Ability to work without direct supervision and make sound technical decisions
• Team-oriented collaborator willing to share knowledge and experience
• Ability to communicate technical risk, business impact, dependencies, decisions, and recommended actions clearly to engineers, managers, CSMs, vendors, and customer technical stakeholders
• Ability to remain accountable for coordination and follow-through until the next owner formally accepts an escalation
• Ability to balance customer requests with platform capacity, resiliency, security, contractual scope, change control, and operational risk
• Excellent written and verbal interpersonal skills and ability to build and maintain collaborative and positive working relationships at all levels
• Ability to effectively interact with all levels of business via phone, written communication, and in person
• Skilled in achieving results in a customer centric environment
• Self-motivated, able to work in a fast-paced 24x7 managed-services environment