Systems Integration Engineer

Blackstone Talent Group, an award-winning technology consulting and talent agency is seeking a Systems Integration Engineer to join our Client's team.

System Integration Engineer

Clearance: TS/SCI Fullscope Poly

Location: Annapolis Junction, MD

We are looking for a System Integration Engineer to join a high-performing agile team that uses the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology to support a nationally significant and fast-paced program.

The selected individual will provide full lifecycle support activities from high-level requirements gathering, systems design input, and end-to-end system integration and deployment. She/he will develop and implement strategies to maintain and improve internal functionality, enhance performance with internal and external systems, protect critical data sets, and provide assessments of system and network vulnerabilities. The ideal candidate will have a strong system administration background and excellent communication skills and be well-versed in current automation technologies to reduce manual intervention. She/he will be responsible for technical planning, system design and integration decisions, and risk evaluation, and will perform minimal amounts of racking and cabling, manually configuring devices, deployment of developed software, vendor firmware, COTS, and FOSS installations and updates when needed. 

Primary Role/Responsibilities:

The selected candidate will provide guidance and support for system integration engineering of large-scale systems, major system elements, and interfacing systems that are part of a large complex network environment with geographically distributed components. She/he will interface with program management, system and software integration engineers, test engineers, information assurance engineers, and other project team members in an Agile environment. The selected candidate will support Linux and Windows-based components within a large, high-performance computing system. She/he/they will provide substantial diagnostics and troubleshooting which involves working with other System Integrators to determine system behavior errors (may be software or hardware related), including examining packet captures at a low level and analyzing event/audit logs to identify errors and determine root causes. The selected candidate will provide support for development and production systems; perform ad-hoc tasking which may include applying software builds, updating application versions, applying security patches, and changing configuration settings; and will also provide support for deployment activities, COTS software evaluation and installation, and external site hardware and software installation. The System Integration Engineer will work with internal Team Leads as well as external organizations to determine acceptable outage windows that will minimize disruption to operational users and/or others who require system access (testers, integrators, etc.). She/he will develop and update data flow diagrams and documentation used in the deployment and management of the system, and will support the development of system configuration documentation, including detailed designs for risk assessments and analyses of alternatives for a variety of system-related issues and concerns.

Qualifications:

• TS/SCI w FS Poly
• Experience troubleshooting IT systems and networks.
• Linux system administration experience.
• Virtualization experience required via any industry standard hypervisor.
• Experience deploying application software including application servers.
• Must be comfortable working on multiple infrastructure networks simultaneously to support multiple systems in various stages of manufacturing and debugging.
• Must have some level of experience developing system analysis, risk analysis, and/or vulnerability assessments.
• Must be capable of developing creative solutions to issues that arise on the fly and ensuring they are tracked and included in the Development, Integration, and
• Production environments before systems deployment.
• Must be capable of planning and prioritizing tasking based on mission and team needs.
• Must be an independent thinker, capable of performing high quality work, both independently and with a team in a fast-moving environment.
• Must possess strong verbal and written communications skills and be able to communicate effectively verbally and in writing.
• Must be able to occasionally work extended hours to support uptimes on production systems for mission critical national security level programs with high levels of visibility.
• Up to 10% travel may be possible to non-hostile locations.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Systems-of-systems integration and development experience using the most up to date and potentially beta software packages to better predict how future changes/updates/end-of-life/discontinuation by hardware and software vendors ma affect systems operation as they each update or add features to their solutions on which our operations rely.
• Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016 along with Server Core administration experience.
• Wireshark Experience, with a focus on low level IP operations.
• Microsoft MDT experience.
• VMWare 6.7 experience.
• Centos & Redhat 7.3 experience.
• Experience with IP KVMs reaching into secured out-of-band networks.
• Powershell and PowerCLI experience with some knowledge of Python or REST APIs.
• SALT, Puppet, CHEF, or Ansible Experience.
• Experience with iSCSI and Flash SANs.
• Solarwinds usage and deployment experience.
• Familiarity with complex network systems, to include firewalls, Load Balancers, NIDS, NAT, PAT, VPC and complex ACLs on multiple hardware architectures including Cisco Nexus and Cisco Catalyst lines.
• Knowledge of PKI systems which use HSMs to validate key and NTP for synchronization.
• Recent hands on experience with ArcSight Security Analysis.
• Past administration experience of OS's that support a Linux Oracle database instances a plus

Security Clearance Required: TS/SCI Full Scope Poly

Blackstone Talent Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of Blackstone Technology Group, a global IT services and software firm that implements technological solutions across commercial industry verticals and the US Federal Government. Blackstone's global talent augmentation practice was founded in 1998. Blackstone Talent Group has offices in San Francisco, Denver, Houston, Colorado Springs, and Washington, DC. We specialize in providing clients the best talent across a variety of industries and sectors.

EOE of Minorities/Females/Veterans/Disabilities