Principal Engineer, Virtualization Infrastructure

Principal Engineer, Virtualization Infrastructure

Location: Juno Beach, FL

Duration: 12 Months

Pay Range: $45.50 – $50.50/hr

Summary

Our client is seeking a Principal Engineer, Virtualization Infrastructure to provide senior-level engineering leadership for enterprise virtualization platforms, including VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN, and Azure Local. This role focuses on platform standards, automation, lifecycle strategy, and complex infrastructure delivery rather than day-to-day virtualization administration, and will help define the strategy, roadmap, standards, and service model for virtualization infrastructure.

Job Responsibilities

In this role, you will manage and support a variety of projects within the Infrastructure Engineering department.

Key responsibilities include:

• Leading the design, engineering, and implementation of enterprise virtualization infrastructure solutions across VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN, and Azure Local
• Acting as technical product owner for virtualization infrastructure services, including standards, roadmap development, lifecycle planning, and platform improvement opportunities
• Developing and maintaining virtualization platform standards, cluster design patterns, configuration baselines, security standards, and operational support models
• Defining and implementing virtualization automation using PowerCLI, Terraform, Ansible, Python, Git, and CI/CD practices
• Partnering with the virtualization architect, project teams, and infrastructure teams to standardize solution designs
• Defining virtualization lifecycle, patching, upgrade, and maintenance standards, including cadence, prioritization, and exception handling
• Partnering with FinOps and infrastructure teams on capacity planning, utilization analysis, forecasting, and hardware lifecycle planning
• Providing advanced troubleshooting for virtualization platform performance, stability, availability, security, and operational issues
• Defining standard virtualization hosting patterns for enterprise workloads, including configuration, monitoring, backup, recovery, security, networking, storage, and support requirements
• Defining monitoring standards, alerting requirements, operational thresholds, service catalog offerings, knowledge management, and CMDB standards
• Partnering with network, storage, cloud, security, backup, resiliency, application, infrastructure, and operations teams on cross-functional projects
• Participating in architecture reviews, design reviews, change planning, and technical governance processes; creating technical documentation, implementation plans, diagrams, and executive-ready materials
• Leading technical workstreams, providing direction to indirect project resources, and working with vendors or managed service providers to resolve complex issues

Essential Job Duties and Job Functions

• Support VMware vSphere, vCenter, ESXi, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN, and Azure Local as core virtualization platforms
• Provide hands-on solution design and implementation across infrastructure, cloud, network, storage, security, operations, FinOps, application, resiliency, and project teams
• Report to infrastructure leadership and provide technical direction to indirect project resources

Knowledge and Skills

Required:

• 10+ years of infrastructure engineering experience, including 5+ years of hands-on virtualization engineering in enterprise environments
• Deep technical experience with VMware vSphere, vCenter, ESXi, cluster design, host configuration, patching, upgrades, hardening, lifecycle management, and operational support
• Experience with VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN, and VMware Operations
• Experience with Azure Local or similar hyperconverged infrastructure platforms
• Advanced troubleshooting experience with virtualization performance, resource contention, storage integration, networking integration, availability, host stability, and workload placement
• Strong PowerCLI and Python scripting experience
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code patterns for virtualization provisioning and configuration using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Git, and CI/CD practices
• Experience developing and maintaining virtualization platform standards, configuration baselines, operational procedures, and lifecycle roadmaps
• Experience with virtualization security hardening, vulnerability remediation, configuration compliance, and enterprise security standards
• Experience with capacity planning, utilization analysis, forecasting, lifecycle planning, and working with FinOps or financial governance teams
• Experience defining monitoring requirements, alert thresholds, operational metrics, service catalog offerings, knowledge management, CMDB standards, and related ServiceNow processes
• Experience leading technical workstreams, working with indirect project resources, and communicating with technical teams, stakeholders, vendors, and senior leadership

Preferred:

• Experience with VMware NSX and VMware automation tools
• Experience with VMware Horizon
• Experience with Azure cloud infrastructure and hybrid/cloud-adjacent virtualization models
• Experience with enterprise backup, recovery, and disaster recovery patterns for virtualized workloads
• Experience with enterprise monitoring platforms and observability tools
• Experience working in regulated or security-focused enterprise environments

Education and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent work experience
• Relevant virtualization, automation, cloud, security, or infrastructure certifications preferred (e.g., VMware VCP/VCAP, Microsoft Azure, Terraform, Ansible, ITIL, or related security/infrastructure certifications)

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