Principal Systems Engineer #208

Principal Systems Engineer #208

Target Hiring Range: $126,372 - $160,000 

Department: Chief Information Officer
Posting Date Range: 11/21/2024-12/5/2024
Pay Grade Range: $126372-$175868
Work Hours: 8:30am-5:00pm
FLSA Status: Exempt
Remote Work Status: Hybrid 
Hybrid Schedule: Primarly remote with ad hoc onsite presence.
All remote or hybrid work arrangements must be performed from within the continental United States, subject to Sergeant at Arms approval.

This vacancy announcement closes at 7pm EST. Late applications will not be accepted.

JOB OVERVIEW

Job Description

The Sergeant at Arms seeks a Principal Systems Engineer to join our Enterprise Operations department. In this role, you will lead the planning, analyzing, testing, installation, troubleshooting, and maintenance of the integrity of the Splunk infrastructure in support of the enterprise environment. Work involves managing all engineering and escalation support aspects, gathering customer requirements, onboarding data, and assisting end users with searches, dashboards, and reports.

The position requires advanced analytical and technical skills and overseeing new technology initiatives. The candidate should have in-depth experience supporting and onboarding new data sources into Splunk, analyzing the data for anomalies and trends, and building dashboards highlighting the key trends of the data. The Principal Systems Engineer should have extensive familiarity with a Linux environment and with editing and maintaining Splunk configuration files and apps

The Principal Systems Engineer oversees collaboration across departments with Engineering team members, interacts with end users to gather requirements, performs troubleshooting, and assists with creating Splunk search queries and dashboards. The Principal Systems Engineer will also be required to interact with senior management as necessary.

Key Accountabilities/Essential Job Duties
Contributes to the section's work effort in responding to incidents from other sections, including the help desk. Supports tasks which 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.

JOB SPECIFICATIONS

Required Education
High School Diploma, GED or an equivalent combination of education and work experience.

Required Work Experience

• Eight to ten years of relevant work experience (GED), six to eight years (Associates), four to eight years (Bachelor’s), two to four years (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.

As part of our hiring process, we may conduct a skills assessment to better understand an applicant’s proficiency in key areas relevant to the role. 

Desired Qualifications

• Expert level experience in a Splunk administration role.
• 6 years of experience in Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, including versions 7, 8, and 9.
• 4 years experience in application interface development using REST APIs.
• Experience with Ansible.

Working Conditions

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• No exceptional physical demands.

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.

 CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT

To be employed by a Senate employing office in a paid position in the continental United States an individual must:
1. Be a U.S. citizen;
2. Be lawfully admitted for permanent residence and seeking citizenship as outlined in 8 U.S.C. § 1324b(a)(3)(B);
3. Be (i) admitted as a refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157 or granted asylum under 8 U.S.C. § 1158 and (ii) have filed a declaration of intention to become a lawful permanent resident and then a citizen when eligible; or
4. Owe allegiance to the U.S. (i.e., qualify as a non-citizen U.S. national under federal law).

Employment is contingent on background / security investigation results.  

BENEFITS AT-A-GLANCE

The SAA provides a highly competitive benefits package for all SAA staff. Our benefits extend beyond health care coverage to help provide employees with student loan reimbursement, professional development, transportation subsidy, TSP/retirement savings, access to our Employee Assistance Program, and more! For more information regarding SAA’s benefits, please visit https://sen.gov/OPPW.

ACCOMMODATIONS

As an Equal Opportunity Employer, the SAA is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. If you are interested in applying for employment with SAA and need special assistance or an accommodation to complete the application process, please submit your request to employment@saa.senate.gov email with “Accommodation” in the subject line.

VOLUNTARY SELF-IDENTIFICATION FOR VETERANS' PREFERENCE

If you are identifying as veterans' preference eligible under the VEOA, please use this link to complete your application for Veterans' Preference AFTER you apply for this position. The link will also be available on the "Thank You" page after you have submitted your job application.

Candidates only need to apply one time for veterans’ preference to be considered for all future veterans’ preference positions within the Senate Sergeant at Arms. 

• All supporting documents must ONLY be provided within the Veterans’ Preference Application and within the stated deadline of the job announcement.
• Late applications for veterans’ preference will not be considered.
• Documentation to obtain veterans’ preference will not be considered if attached to the job application.
• If you need to revise or resubmit your Application for Veterans' Preference/documents, please withdraw your previous Application for Veterans' Preference and resubmit. If you require assistance, please email employment@saa.senate.gov.
• mailto:employment@saa.senate.gov="">To view additional information regarding the VEOA, please click here.

An applicant who declines to self-identify as a disabled veteran and/or to provide information and documentation regarding his/her disabled veteran’s status will not be subjected to an adverse employment action, but the individual may be ruled ineligible for veterans’ preference.

Salary : $126,372 - $175,868