[Hiring] Principal Data Center & Cloud Engineering Lead and Strategist @TISTA Science and Technology Corporation

Role Description

TISTA is seeking a Principal-level Data Center and Cloud Engineering Lead and Strategist to shape and deliver the long-term infrastructure direction for VA. This role combines enterprise strategy, physical data center engineering, hybrid-cloud architecture, AI infrastructure planning, and hands-on automation leadership.

• Lead development and refresh of a ten-year estate strategy covering site roles, capacity, resilience, AI demand, lifecycle exposure, consolidation, cloud placement, and retirement.
• Personally conduct onsite walkthroughs and reconcile rack elevations, equipment, power connections, cabling, labels, network paths, environmental readings, and asset records.
• Develop integrated compute, storage, network, virtualization, container, backup, and recovery designs across data centers and cloud.
• Assess how AI training, fine-tuning, and inference requirements affect accelerator/GPU capacity, memory, rack density, power, cooling, networking, storage throughput, data locality, and resiliency.
• Lead an automation roadmap covering approved bare-metal, virtual, and cloud provisioning; configuration and firmware lifecycle; patching; network/storage integration; tagging; inventory reconciliation; backup onboarding; and decommissioning.
• Partner with data, AI, and operations specialists to evaluate approved use cases such as anomaly detection, capacity forecasting, predictive maintenance, incident correlation, and assisted diagnostics.
• Own the technical quality of assigned assessments, designs, and implementation packages.
• Maintain accurate rack layouts, drawings, cable and power schedules, dependency maps, lifecycle records, and DCIM/CMDB relationships.
• Serve as a senior technical leader within IE&O Engineering, Architecture, Strategy and Governance (EAS).

Qualifications

• 15+ years of progressively responsible infrastructure engineering experience, including 8+ years in data center engineering/architecture and 5+ years leading complex engineering or modernization initiatives.
• Recent, personally performed data center assessments and practical command of rack elevations, power-path redundancy, PDUs, airflow/cooling, cabling, connectivity, equipment placement, capacity, and as-built validation.
• Evidence of authoring a multi-year infrastructure or data center strategy and translating it into implemented changes.
• Substantial experience with at least one major cloud platform and enterprise compute, storage, networking, virtualization, and backup/recovery.
• Hands-on ability to develop or review infrastructure automation, APIs, source-controlled configurations, tests, and recovery logic.
• Ability to conduct required onsite assessments and travel to designated facilities under applicable safety and access procedures.

Requirements

• Ability to read and challenge electrical single-line, mechanical, network, and rack documentation with the appropriate specialists.
• Demonstrated ability to reason through AI infrastructure requirements and safely evaluate AI-enabled operational improvements.
• Must be able to obtain and maintain the personnel suitability, credentials, system access, and training required per a Tier 4 / High Risk clearance.

Benefits

• Above Industry Healthcare Benefits
• Remote Working Options
• Paid Time Off
• Training/Certification opportunities
• Healthcare Savings Account & Flexible Savings Account
• Paid Life Insurance
• Short-term & Long-term Disability
• 401K Match
• Tuition Reimbursement
• Employee Assistance Program
• Paid Holidays
• Military Leave
• And much more!