Entry Level System Admin Jobs in Reston, VA (NOW HIRING)

Position Description: CGI Federal has an exciting opportunity for Storage Administrators within our Intel sector advancing the national security mission through cutting edge technology. You must have a passion for keeping pace with rapidly evolving technology advancements and leveraging your knowledge on a highly collaborative team to deliver state-of-the-art capabilities. The Storage Administrator assists with monitoring data storage systems, running routine backups, and resolving basic space allocation tasks under the supervision of senior IT staff. The role serves as an entry-level position focused on building foundational data infrastructure skills. CGI Federal is growing its high-performance team whose members share a passion for building high-quality, scalable, advanced IT solutions in a collaborative, fast-paced, outcome-driven mission. This position is located in our Arlington office; however, a hybrid working model is acceptable. Your future duties and responsibilities: Key Responsibilities (Entry Level) • Backup Monitoring: Track scheduled daily and weekly backup jobs across servers to ensure enterprise data is protected.
• Basic Provisioning: Execute simple tasks to allocate disk space or file shares to end-users and servers as requested.
• System Monitoring: Check storage hardware health, network switches, and available storage capacity using standard management tools.
• Issue Triage: Create support tickets and escalate complex connectivity or hardware failures to senior administrators.
• Documentation: Maintain and update basic IT diagrams, network topologies, and routine operating procedures. Key Responsibilities (Junior Level)
• Storage Provisioning: Allocate and map LUNs or shared drives to servers and virtual machines based on predefined requirements.
• Backup & Recovery: Execute and monitor routine data backups, verify the success of backup jobs, and perform basic file or system restorations.
• Performance & Capacity Monitoring: Run reports on disk usage, track data growth trends, and reclaim unused or abandoned storage capacity.
• Hardware & Software Maintenance: Perform routine health checks, apply firmware updates, and help manage hardware lifecycles.
• Tier 1 Troubleshooting: Act as the first point of contact for storage-related incidents, such as latency issues, path failures, or access problems.
• Documentation: Maintain and update network diagrams, operational procedures, and technical documentation. Key Responsibilities (Mid-Level)
• Enterprise Storage Management: Provision and manage block and file storage across multi-vendor environments (e.g., Pure Storage, Dell, NetApp, IBM).
• Incident Resolution: Troubleshoot complex, escalated storage issues, bottlenecks, and fabric/switch (Fiber Channel) connectivity problems.
• Performance Tuning & Monitoring: Utilize monitoring tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, vendor-specific consoles) to track latency, IOPS, and proactively identify bottlenecks.
• Data Protection & Recovery: Execute and verify snapshot schedules, replication policies, and backup/restore operations to ensure strict recovery point and time objectives.
• Lifecycle Management: Plan capacity, reclaim unused storage, and assist in non-disruptive firmware updates and hardware expansions.
• Automation: Write and maintain scripts (e.g., Python, Bash, PowerShell) to automate routine provisioning and capacity reporting. Key Responsibilities (Senior Level)
Architecture & Engineering
• Design, build, and scale highly resilient enterprise SAN, NAS, and distributed object storage infrastructures across hybrid on-premise and multi-cloud environments.
• Formulate long-term storage capacity planning and lifecycle management strategies tied to business continuity and global data growth.
• Evaluate and integrate bleeding-edge software-defined storage (SDS) and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) architectures to eliminate performance bottlenecks.
Operations & Advanced Troubleshooting
• Spearhead Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and resolve Tier 3/escalated incidents related to multi-vendor storage arrays, high-performance computing (HPC) parallel file systems, and Fiber Channel (FC) interconnection fabrics.
• Perform extreme-level storage and IOPS performance tuning to optimize database and virtual machine storage network traffic.
• Administer, zone, and configure complex SAN topologies (e.g., Brocade/Cisco MDS) and enterprise NAS systems (e.g., Pure Storage, NetApp DataONTAP).
Data Protection, DR & Automation
• Architect and test multi-site disaster recovery (DR) architectures, focusing on synchronous/asynchronous replication, malware-resilient immutable snapshots, and synthetic backup pipelines (e.g., Rubrik, Commvault).
• Create infrastructure-as-code (IaC) solutions and automation scripts (via Python, Ansible, or Terraform) for routine provisioning, auditing, and reporting.
• Enforce strict Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and data security/governance policies to meet regulatory requirements. Key Responsibilities (SME Level)
• Architectural Design & Engineering: Design multi-petabyte unified storage architectures (SAN, NAS, Object, and NVMe-oF) that balance cost, capacity, and IOPS to meet strict enterprise service-level agreements.
• Automation & Orchestration: Engineer Infrastructure as Code (IaC) pipelines utilizing APIs, Python, and REST to automate LUN provisioning, zoning, and capacity tiering.
• Resiliency & Data Protection: Design continuous replication strategies, active-active datacenter mirroring (e.g., SRDF/Metro), and immutable, air-gapped backup vaulting for comprehensive ransomware mitigation.
• Performance Tuning & Analytics: Perform deep-packet and protocol-level (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, SMB) troubleshooting to eliminate I/O bottlenecks in hyper-converged and highly virtualized host environments.
• Lifecycle Management & Capacity Planning: Direct predictive analytics and capacity modeling to drive hardware refresh cycles, cloud tiering, and data lifecycle management.
• Compliance & Security: Enforce Zero Trust security postures by implementing storage-level encryption at rest/in-flight, RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), and STIGs across classified and unclassified domains. Required qualifications to be successful in this role: All roles require an active TS/SCI with Poly Entry Level:
• Education: o High School Diploma/GED with 4 years of relevant experience,
o Associates Degree with 2 years of relevant experience, o or Bachelor's Degree with 0 years of relevant experience
• Technical Knowledge: Basic understanding of networking, operating systems (Linux/Windows), and virtual environments (VMware).
• Soft Skills: Strong attention to detail, eagerness to learn enterprise storage concepts, and good communication skills for collaborating with other IT teams. Junior Level/Moderate:
• Education: o High School Diploma/GED with 6 years of relevant experience,
o Associates Degree with 4 years of relevant experience, o Bachelor's Degree with 2 years of relevant experience, o or Masters Degree with 0 years of relevant experience
• Technical Knowledge: Basic understanding of Storage Area Networks (SAN), Network-Attached Storage (NAS), and RAID configurations.
• Collaboration: Ability to work alongside systems administrators, database administrators, and network engineers to resolve infrastructure incidents. Mid-Level/Complex:
• Education: o High School Diploma/GED with 8 years of relevant experience,
o Associates Degree with 6 years of relevant experience, o Bachelor's Degree with 4 years of relevant experience, o or Masters Degree with 2 years of relevant experience,
o or PhD with 0 years of relevant experience
• Storage Protocols: Deep understanding of SAN (FC, iSCSI) and NAS (NFS, SMB) protocols.
• Operating Systems: Solid foundational knowledge of Linux, Windows Server, and hypervisors (e.g., VMware vSphere) to effectively troubleshoot storage mounting and connectivity.
• Backup Solutions: Familiarity with enterprise backup architectures (e.g., Veeam, Commvault, or Avamar).
• Scripting: Basic to intermediate proficiency in Python, Bash, or PowerShell Senior Level/Exceptionally Complex:
• Education: o High School Diploma/GED with 10 years of relevant experience,
o Associates Degree with 8 years of relevant experience, o Bachelor's Degree with 6 years of relevant experience, o or Masters Degree with 4 years of relevant experience,
o or PhD with 2 years of relevant experience
• Deep Domain Knowledge: Exceptional troubleshooting capability within complex multi-vendor ecosystems (e.g., EMC, IBM, NetApp, Pure Storage).
• Certifications: Industry-standard architect-level credentials are highly preferred (e.g., NetApp Certified Data Administrator/Architect, EMCIE, SNIA Certified Storage Architect) SME Level/Exceptionally Complex:
• Education: o High School Diploma/GED with 12 years of relevant experience,
o Associates Degree with 10 years of relevant experience, o Bachelor's Degree with 8 years of relevant experience, o or Masters Degree with 6 years of relevant experience,
o or PhD with 4 years of relevant experience
• Domain Expertise: Deep hands-on proficiency with tier-1 arrays (e.g., Pure Storage, Dell PowerMax/Unity, NetApp ONTAP, IBM FlashSystem) and data protection platforms (e.g., Rubrik, Commvault, Veeam).
• Protocol & Fabrics: Mastery of Fibre Channel (FC) SAN fabric routing, NVMe, and enterprise NAS protocols.
• Cloud & Virtualization: Exceptional understanding of storage integration with VMware vSphere, Kubernetes persistent volumes, and native cloud storage services. CGI is required by law in some jurisdictions to include a reasonable estimate of the compensation range for this role. The determination of this range includes various factors not limited to skill set, level, experience, relevant training, and licensure and certifications. To support the ability to reward for merit-based performance, CGI typically does not hire individuals at or near the top of the range for their