Principal Systems Engineer #5480

Full Job Description

The Senate Sergeant at Arms is seeking a Principal Systems Engineer. The complete vacancy announcement and application can be found on the United States Senate Career Page at https://sen.gov/1VNZQ.

This vacancy announcement closes at 7pm EST on the closing date. Late applications will not be accepted.

Other Duties/ Responsibilities Required Work Experience Eight to ten years of relevant work experience (GED), six to eight (Associates), four to six years (Bachelor’s), two to four (Master’s).

Required Special Skills/ Knowledge Provides long-range strategic planning activities for the Senate in the areas of information technology or telecommunications hardware, software, storage solutions, and networking systems; monitors the impact of technological developments; identifies emerging technologies.

Provides expert-level technical support on Senate hardware, software, storage solutions, and network systems to vendors, other technical staff, and other divisions and departments; resolves critical and complex systems, applications, storage or communications performance problems.

Serves as project manager on assigned projects; plans, assigns, directs and coordinates work efforts; develops project plans, timetables and staff assignments.

Customizes, tests, recommends and configures operating and network systems and software platforms; monitors, evaluates and resolves hardware/software configuration system performance problems; recommends third party software on other operating systems.

Desired Qualifications Develop, maintain, and troubleshoot CI/CD pipelines to streamline build and deployment processes.

Design and maintain a Disaster Recovery architecture utilizing replication over a WAN for all assigned systems.

GitLab Runner: Set up and manage GitLab Runners (shared or specific) to execute jobs in pipelines.

Knowledge of installing, configuring, and maintaining GitLab Runners on different environments (VMs, Kubernetes, Docker).

Manage multi-stage pipelines to build, test, and deploy processes, ensuring reliable and fast delivery of applications.

Experience working with Git for source code management and version control in DevOps workflows. Able to work with git workflow models like git-branch.

Perform tasks like handling conflicts, rolling back commits, or squashing commits.

Experience using a commercial Content Delivery Network (CDN) as a frontend to cache, distribute, and protect public-facing websites.

Experience in developing and/or running applications written in PHP, NodeJS, .NET, and Python as examples. Experience with scripting/developing in Bash shell, PERL, and/or JavaScript.

Basic understanding of networking, database integration, and storage as backend systems to hosting web applications and ability to perform basic checks and debugging for this underlying infrastructure.

Working Conditions The U.S. Senate network cannot be taken offline for maintenance during the workday, or while the Senate is in session.

As such, maintenance windows may only occur at night, on weekends, and occasionally on holidays.

Employees who perform systems upgrades, maintenance, wiring, backups, support our alternate data centers will have schedules that include working nights, weekends, and holidays.

This position directly supports essential services of the U.S. Senate.

As such, this position requires the employee be available and prepared to work during government shutdowns, in inclement weather, on holidays, weekends, and during late nights to ensure essential services to the Senate continue without interruption.

In the context of government furloughs, this position is considered excepted. Since this position requires onsite presence in support of the U.S.

Senate when in session, this position requires the employee to be available and prepared to work during government shutdowns, in inclement weather, on holidays, and during late night, overnight, and weekend sessions.

In the context of government furloughs, this position is considered excepted. Security Clearance This position requires that the applicant obtain and maintain a Secret U.S.

Government security clearance. Applicants must be U.S. citizens in order for the SAA to submit your application for a security clearance. Major Duties:

Contributes to the section's work effort in responding to incidents from other sections, including the help desk.

Supports tasks may include helping to develop standard operating procedures, assignments, and coordination of work efforts to address issues.

Assists users with computer needs such as installing and configuring software/hardware on their PC; troubleshoots problems with user systems. Provisions new accounts for users.

Supports the section's work effort to develop processes and procedures to streamline the resolution of issues.

Provides technical support for Senate information technology or telecommunications services, systems, hardware, software, and storage solutions to the users; supports Senate offices, contract support vendors, and other technical staff in troubleshooting and managing the various Senate environments.

Maintains and monitors LAN/WAN and SAN operations and solves LAN/WAN and SAN applications problems; installs integrates, customizes, enhances, troubleshoots, and tests LAN and SAN hardware and software.

Assists in installing, upgrading, customizing, tuning, and maintaining databases for optimal performance and availability; assists in developing, testing, and implementing database store procedures, functions, triggers, views, and packages.

Conducts acceptance and integration testing; assists vendor systems implementation by troubleshooting related system issues affecting Senate users.

Analyzes, designs, develops, implements, and maintains applications to meet the needs of Senate users; assists with product evaluations and implementation.

Attends internal training provided by subject matter experts to understand operational tasks, documents support needs, and share the information within the assigned section. Other duties as assigned.