Data Storage Engineer

Job Description

Position Summary
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Base-2 Solutions is seeking a Data Storage Engineer to support the National Digital Exploitation \& OSINT Center (NDOC) at the Intelligence Community Campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The role provides storage engineering, systems administration, architecture, lifecycle planning, operations, and optimization across on-premises and cloud environments. The engineer will support enterprise storage availability, performance, capacity, resilience, disaster recovery, documentation, and continuous improvement initiatives.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities
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* Design and engineer scalable enterprise storage architectures supporting performance, resiliency, high availability, and mission growth requirements across on-premises and cloud environments.
* Develop logical and physical storage architectures, reference designs, and engineering roadmaps aligned with mission requirements and future capacity demands.
* Perform systems design and engineering analysis for storage modernization initiatives, including solution trade studies, technology evaluations, and engineering recommendations.
* Engineer lifecycle replacement strategies for enterprise storage infrastructure while balancing risk, obsolescence, cost, and operational continuity.
* Develop and maintain engineering artifacts, including architecture diagrams, low-level designs, interface documentation, data flow mappings, and implementation plans.
* Apply systems engineering principles to storage integration, interoperability, performance optimization, and infrastructure resilience.
* Analyze system dependencies, failure modes, and technical risks, and develop mitigation strategies to improve reliability and supportability.
* Engineer and optimize storage solutions for multi-petabyte environments supporting virtualization, GPU- and compute-intensive workloads, and mission-critical applications.
* Provide engineering support for performance modeling, capacity forecasting, and lifecycle planning using operational metrics and trend analysis.
* Contribute to disaster recovery architecture, data protection engineering, and continuity solution design for enterprise storage services.
* Install, configure, and administer enterprise storage systems from multiple vendors, including Dell EMC and Quantum.
* Install, configure, and administer Rubrik server and client software; schedule and monitor backup policies; and generate backup status reports.
* Administer Cisco Brocade Fibre Channel switch fabrics, configure single-initiator zone sets, and monitor switch utilization and performance.
* Create and secure SMB file shares.
* Coordinate with server administrators to create, secure, and mount NFS exports.
* Develop and implement disaster recovery and Continuity of Operations plans in accordance with customer requirements.
* Install, configure, maintain, and administer Linux and Windows servers supporting storage operations, including Rubrik, Media, DSM, and Master servers.
* Build capacity management dashboards that improve visibility into enterprise storage use, health, and resilience and support infrastructure lifecycle replacement planning.
* Configure Rubrik policies and troubleshoot and resolve backup job failures.
* Coordinate with vCenter administrators to provision Storage Area Network resources to VMware ESX cluster datastores.
* Configure and manage volume snapshots and assist customers with point-in-time file restores.
* Schedule and monitor volume replication for disaster recovery.
* Monitor the health and availability of infrastructure applications and systems.
* Work with vendors to troubleshoot and resolve hardware and software failures.
* Coordinate with Change Management to deconflict and schedule hardware maintenance activities, system and firmware updates, and other configuration changes.
* Execute system changes during scheduled maintenance windows.
* Monitor and evaluate system performance and capacity trends.
* Resolve Tier 2 and Tier 3 service requests.
* Identify opportunities to automate operations and develop automated solutions using Dell and NetApp system APIs.
* Seek opportunities for continuous improvement to support effective and efficient operations.
* Work with cloud storage solutions as needed for cloud applications.
* Work independently with minimal supervision.
* Mentor junior team members.

Required Qualifications
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* Relevant data storage engineering and administration experience meeting an applicable education and experience pathway in the equivalency section.
* Extensive experience managing and administering Veritas Rubrik.
* Experience with scripting technologies such as PowerShell.
* Working knowledge of Unix- or Linux-based operating systems.
* Working knowledge of Distributed File System (DFS).
* Excellent communication skills.
* Ability to mentor junior team members.
* Ability to complete complex projects with minimal direction.
* Experience working independently to support a 24/7/365 customer environment.
* Experience contributing to deliverables and meeting performance metrics.
* Experience coordinating with senior management and customers.
* Candidate must, at a minimum, meet DoD 8570.11 IAT Level II certification requirements.
* Extensive experience administering enterprise-level data storage systems.
* SAN administration, including provisioning LUNs, managing Fibre Channel zoning, and mapping storage to servers.
* NAS administration, including NFS and SMB file sharing.
* Integration with VMware ESX Server.
* Knowledge of data migration strategies.
* Knowledge of snapshots.
* Knowledge of volume replication.
* Experience managing file and share permissions in an Active Directory environment.
* Knowledge of storage monitoring and performance tuning.
* Understanding of cloud storage management.
* US Citizenship is required.

Preferred Qualifications
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* Experience with Dell Storage Center, Dell Compellent, and Data Domain.
* Familiarity with model-based or traditional systems engineering disciplines, architecture frameworks, and engineering documentation practices.
* Experience with disaster recovery and COOP storage backup and recovery within and across data centers and the cloud.
* Ability to analyze cloud migration approaches to support customer decision-making for effective and efficient cloud migrations.
* Experience managing Distributed File System (DFS) namespaces.

Required Education and Experience Equivalency
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* Bachelor's degree with 8 years of relevant experience.
* Master's degree with 6 years of relevant experience.
* Associate's degree with 12 years of related experience.
* High School Diploma with 14 years of related experience.

Required Certifications
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* Candidate must, at a minimum, meet DoD 8570.11 IAT Level II certification requirements (currently Security CE, CCNA-Security, GSEC, or SSCP along with an appropriate computing environment (CE) certification).

Required Security Clearance
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* Active Top Secret/SCI