Applications Support Specialist

Peraton is seeking an Applications Support Specialist to join our team of qualified and diverse individuals on our Department of State (DOS) Bureau of Diplomatic Technology (DT) Consular Affairs Enterprise Infrastructure Operations (CAEIO) program. CAEIO provides IT Operations and Maintenance to modernize the legacy networks, applications, and databases supporting consular applications and services globally.

The Applications Support Specialist will be a member of the Applications Support team, responsible for providing support services related to the installation and deployment of CA applications. Activities include troubleshooting, diagnosis, evaluation, maintenance, availability, and performance monitoring. The team focuses on reducing operational down time during both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance by accelerating the deployment of approved changes, fixes, and updates.

Core Work Schedule: Monday – Friday, 7:00 AM ET – 4:00 PM ET (Flexible).

Location: This position is fully remote; however, candidates must reside in the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area (DMV) to accommodate occasional onsite meetings, training, or customer support activities at the Washington, DC, customer location or the Peraton office in Sterling, VA. The number of days the Support Specialist works on-site in Washington, DC, or Sterling, VA, is subject to change based on government/program requirements (for example, surge support might require the individual to be in the office five days per week). 

Roles and Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the EIO Database and Infrastructure teams, other contractor teams and partner organizations to establish and maintain CA systems.
• Perform root cause analysis and document all existing and potential problems and outages, along with corrective actions.
• Ensure that all problems/incidents are logged into the Ticket Management System and properly managed.
• Participate in planning meetings to execute proactive system upgrades and new technology implementations.
• Update government task manager (GTM) on production issues and initiatives.
• Identify opportunities to automate routine processes.
• Review SOPs for maintaining CA operational capability and work with staff to document procedures.
• Attend all CA applications training when scheduled.

Monitoring

• Identify CA components that can be monitored using Zabbix/Grafana/Splunk dashboards and alerts, or other identified systems.
• Coordinate with the monitoring team on updates to CA servers and configurations that affect monitoring services (new/removed servers, sites).

Deployments

• Manage day-to-day enterprise security hygiene, rapidly executing remediations for high-severity CVEs and actively exploited KEVs to protect core systems and applications.
• Coordinate with Development and Database teams to plan and implement upgrades or new components.
• Maintain list of scheduled production events and ensure timing does not conflict with operational requirements.
• Provide required notifications of upcoming deployments.

Reporting

• Provide weekly activity reports on recent and upcoming activities.
• Identify issues that need to be addressed with the client.
• Provide weekly summaries of incidents handled by staff.
• Provide daily notifications of current activities, ongoing or just-completed incidents, and imminent upcoming events.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelors degree and 12 years of experience or a Masters degree and 10 years of experience or an Associates degree and 14 years of experience or a High School diploma/equivalent and 16 years of experience. 
• U.S. citizenship and minimum active SECRET Government Security Clearance with the ability to obtain TOP SECRET clearance.
• 5+ years of experience in applications support.
• Deep understanding of Tier 2 Windows and/or Linux OS installation and configuration issues.
• Understanding of multi-tier applications that interface with RDMSs (relational database management systems), such as Oracle.
• Experience working with custom applications and troubleshooting issues in a client-server environment.
• Ability to support ServiceNow tickets related to CA systems and applications.
• Experience working with web-based applications running on Apache and/or IIS.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting the U.S. Department of State.
• Experience working with Salesforce application installations and troubleshooting.
• Experience working with OpenShift container / applications environment.
• Experience providing applications support and deployments in a cloud environment.