Data Center Engineer / Architect

GovCIO is currently hiring for Data Center Engineer to support a moderinization effort. This position is located in Hampton, VA and will be a fully onsite position.

• Design and lead end-to-end data center migration strategies, including on-premises to on-premises transitions, data center consolidations, and hybrid or cloud-adjacent migrations.
• Assess current data center environments, dependencies, and risks to create detailed migration roadmaps and execution plans.
• Architect target-state data center designs that align with business objectives, security standards, and compliance requirements.
• Collaborate closely with infrastructure, network, storage, security, and application teams to coordinate and execute migration activities.
• Establish standards, best practices, and architectural frameworks to support ongoing data center operations and future scalability.
• Lead technical decision-making across virtualization platforms, storage solutions, networking architectures, backup strategies, and disaster recovery planning.
• Oversee migration execution, including cutover planning, validation activities, and post-migration optimization.
• Identify and mitigate performance, availability, data integrity, and security risks throughout the migration lifecycle.
• Produce comprehensive documentation such as architecture diagrams, runbooks, migration plans, and operational handoff materials.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to engineering and operations teams.
• Investigates the technical capabilities of company services and competing equipment and/or solutions.
• Stays abreast of developments in hardware and software.
• Generates quantifiable requirements based on customer description, system planning and design, and ensures requirements comply through formal verification methods.
• Translates high level product development strategies into network and system requirement specifications and works with other engineering disciplines to develop lower-level detailed implementation requirements.
• Establishes and coordinates development of standards, practices, and procedures as related to the network and system development.
• Designs interfaces and brings network and system elements together so they work as a whole.
• Assesses performance using evaluation criteria and technical performance measures.
• Provides customer liaison and support for business development activities and to understand and shape requirements.
• Coordinates the planning, design, and installation of equipment, using knowledge of engineering and programming as well as sophisticated instruments and computers.
• Participates in system conceptual design and documentation of the design concepts.
• Designs, creates, and builds network services, equipment and devices.

Required Education and Experience
Bachelor’s Degree with 12+ yrs experience

• Clearance Required: Top Secret/SCI

Required Skills:

• Deep expertise in data center infrastructure, including compute, storage, and networking

• Strong understanding of virtualization platforms (VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, etc.)

• Proficiency in designing and executing large-scale data center migrations

• Knowledge of cloud platforms and hybrid/cloud-adjacent architectures

• Experience with storage architectures (SAN, NAS, object storage)

• Advanced networking knowledge, including routing, switching, firewalls, and load balancing

• Familiarity with backup, recovery, and disaster recovery strategies

• Strong understanding of security frameworks, compliance requirements, and risk mitigation

• Ability to develop architectural standards, frameworks, and documentation

• Experience with automation and orchestration tools (PowerShell, Ansible, etc.)

• Proficiency in dependency mapping, workload analysis, and capacity planning

• DoD 8140 IAT Level II certification (Security+ CE,CCNA-Security,CySA+,CND)

Preferred Skills and Experience