Centers of Excellence - Infrastructure Optimization Specialist

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Centers of Excellence is hiring for GS-15 Centers of Excellence - Infrastructure Optimization Specialist. This page contains information related to the role as well as a link to submit your application. Check out Join TTS Hiring Process to learn more the application process.

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Basic Information
Qualifications
How to apply

Role Summary:

Centers of Excellence - Infrastructure Optimization Specialist - GS-15

We are looking for an Infrastructure Optimization lead to join the IT Modernization Centers of Excellence (COE) to help develop the capabilities and services of our partner agencies.

In collaboration with agency stakeholders, you will be providing the technical leadership for the design, planning, and delivery of key infrastructure modernization strategies that will drive optimizations and improvements in the security, agility, responsiveness, and capital efficiency of their IT infrastructure and customer delivery services.

You will need a thorough knowledge of infrastructure, networking, cloud, integration, data, custom & packaged applications, and security to ensure that the agency’s infrastructure architecture meets their current and future needs in an efficient, sustainable, agile, and adaptable manner.

Key Objectives

Key objective #1: Serving as the innovative technical leader, you will work with our agency partners to develop strategies and execute initiatives to modernize their highly complex and critical systems and infrastructure, empowering them better deliver on their mission.

Use modern research methods and best practices to fully understand the real needs of the users and the impact driven by the agency’s systems & infrastructure
Analyze current system architecture and existing products to identify the functionality and capabilities that can be leveraged and the areas requiring refactoring
Develop solutions with an API first mindset using reusable components and operational strategies to support scalability, availability, performance, monitoring, backup, etc, to improve the security, resiliency, and agility of infrastructure and applications
Leverage native cloud capabilities such as data storage, performance, and security enhancements, as well as auto-scaling and performance/capacity management to promote technical improvements in the defendability and cost efficiency of the agency infrastructure services
Work closely with the internal and contract developers, conducting code reviews and providing feedback and guidance when necessary
Contribute high-quality, well-tested, maintainable infrastructure configurations, including code-based automation using modern software development, open source, and industry best practices

Practice and enthusiastically share agile methodologies throughout all stages of the project lifecycle
Deliver educational workshops to accelerate learning and adoption of agile principles and practices
Inspire honesty and integrity through open communication and liberal knowledge sharing across a multi-disciplinary teams
Create compelling case studies on how users are benefiting from the program, providing a special focus on lessons learned
Capture specific capabilities (e.g. strategies, roadmaps, playbooks) to document good practices across government

Key objective #3: Practice an exceptional level of customer service with all partners, providing a unique, tailored experience.

Explain product or services to people who have varying levels of technical knowledge — always meet the agency partner where they are
Empathetically guide our agency partners through the bureaucracy of the sometimes long and arduous compliance and security processes
Skillfully map specific inquiries to product capabilities, identifying the product that best meets the agency partner’s needs
Serve as a liaison between the stakeholders and the project teams, delivering feedback to the team, enabling them to make necessary changes to product performance or presentation
Support a safe, inclusive workplace and a positive team culture where all team members value diversity and individual differences

Basic Information

Job announcement number: tbd

Opening and closing period for this job application: TBD to TBD

Job Title: Innovation Specialist

Series & Grade: 0301 - 15

Promotion Potential: GS-15

Salary Range: $142,700 to $170,800

For specific details on locality pay, please visit OPM’s Salaries & Wages page or for a salary calculator OPM’s 2020 General Schedule (GS) Salary Calculator. If you are a new federal employee, your starting salary will likely be set at the Step 1 of the grade for which you applied to.

Location: Washington, DC

Number of vacancies: 2 (Additional vacancies may be filled from this announcement as needed)

Supervisory status: NO

Travel requirement: Occasional travel may be required up to 10%-20% per year

Who May Apply: All United States citizens and nationals (residents of American Samoa and Swains Islands) and non-GSA employees/contractors are eligible to apply.

Security clearance: Public trust. Background investigation required.

Work Schedule: Full time

Appointment Type: Excepted Service: Not to exceed 24 months (2 years); may be extended for an additional 2 years for a maximum of 4 years total.

Job Summary

This is a Schedule A position under 5 CFR 213.3102(r) to hire unique technical skills to develop innovative digital tools and services in the Excepted Service. TTS is charged with developing innovative digital tools and services. TTS uses lean startup and agile development principles to make easy things easy and hard things possible.

As an Innovation Specialist the incumbent serves the government and makes an impact on a truly massive scale. The position requires that fellows perform work of an exceptional degree of difficulty across a wide range of topics at the convergence of technology, policy, and delivery. The incumbent leverages his/her experience deploying high quality, user centric platforms and services to lead major initiatives, consult on systems and policy proposals, and provide technical, policy, and programmatic guidance to government. The position involves access to PII data.

This position is located within the General Services Administration (GSA), Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), Technology Transformation Service (TTS), Office of COE.

GSA has been repeatedly named as one of the ‘Best Places to Work’ in the federal government. You will have access to many benefits including:

Health insurance (choose from a wide range of plans)
Life insurance coverage with several options
Sick leave and vacation time, including 10 paid holidays per year
Thrift Savings Plan (similar to a 401(k) plan)
Flexible work schedules and telework
Transit and child care subsidies
Training and development
Flexible spending accounts
Long-term care insurance
Training and development

Key Requirements

You must be a U.S. Citizen or National (residents of American Samoa and Swains Islands)
Suitable for federal employment, determined by a background investigation.
You may be required to serve a trial period.
Direct Deposit of salary check to financial organization required.
Register with Selective Service, if you are required by https://www.sss.gov/Registration-Info/Who-Registration

Employment Requirements

Serve a one year trial period, if required.
Undergo and pass a background investigation. You must be granted this clearance before you can start the job.
Have your identity and work status eligibility verified if you are not a GSA employee. We will use the Department of Homeland Security’s e-Verify system for this.
Any discrepancies must be resolved as a condition of continued employment.
Complete a financial disclosure report to verify that no conflict, or an appearance of conflict, exists between your financial interest and this position.

Duties

Typical duties include but are not limited to: Conceiving/recommending projects/studies to advance the state of the art in the specialty area; applying forward thinking design and development principles to product or services development, delivery and program management, such as lean startup, user centered design, and agile development; Analyzing and scoping the technical and policy requirements needed to implement complex digital solutions; Assessing the state of digital services provided by the Federal Government, and working to align strategies and practice; conferring with key government/private officials and top experts in the field, representing the agency at technical symposia and/or conferences; Developing authoritative papers/reports; developing and leading adoption of government wide standards for digital services, leading to their adoption across citizen and business facing government Services; Demonstrating thought leadership and contributing best practices in a variety of technologies and principles; Contributing to a talent strategy that includes recruiting innovators and entrepreneurs to participate in solving complex and esoteric challenges.

Evaluations

We will use a method called Category Rating to assess your application.

Here’s how it will work:

You will be scored based on a review of your application materials, measuring your possession of each of the following competencies

Leadership: Ability to effectively inspire and lead cross-functional teams to meet the project vision and shared objectives of agency partner organizations, while simultaneously providing support and guidance to all members of the partner agency.
Modern Technology and Practices: The ability to understand and apply modern technology and software development principles and practices.
Agile Orientation: Ability to apply agile and open source philosophies to deliver work in a frequent and iterative fashion to address user needs.
Communication: Communicate effectively with a variety of audiences, particularly in consulting scenarios, to establish a shared vision and understanding of a project’s technical implementation, objectives and goals.
TTS Core Values Alignment: Working with integrity, transparency and resiliency in civic minded or high impact environment.

If found to be eligible and at least minimally qualified for the position, your score will be used to place you in a category (Best Qualified, Well Qualified, or Qualified).

If your resume does not support your possession of the competencies listed above, we may lower your score, which could place you in a lower category.

Within each category, veterans will receive selection priority over non-veterans if supported by appropriate documentation.

Qualifications

All applications will be reviewed by a panel of subject matter experts against a scoring rubric created for this role. In order to properly be able to evaluate your previous experience, we recommend being as detailed as possible in your resume and following our general guidance on creating federal style resume.

To qualify for this role, you must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to the GS-14 grade level in the Federal service. Specialized experience is:

Experience leading a team to deliver projects or initiatives to migrate digital products or services to a cloud environment. This experience must include ALL of the following:
- Leading client-facing consulting projects or initiatives
- Leading a cross-functional team using agile methodologies to deliver projects or initiatives
- Conducting change management activities across an organization in support of digital product or service
- Leading large scale or enterprise wide migrations (e.g. migrating legacy data center into a hybrid cloud environment)
- Managing federal technology or security compliance requirements for cloud based digital products or services
Experience providing technical expertise on cloud adoption projects or initiatives. This experience must include TWO of the following:
- Leading cloud adoption projects or initiatives that use Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
- Leading cloud adoption projects or initiatives that use legacy infrastructure configurations
- Leading cloud adoption projects or initiatives that require data migrations strategies
- Leading cloud adoption projects or initiatives that use Virtualization technologies
- Leading cloud adoption projects or initiatives that use Containerization technologie

Qualification determinations cannot be made when resumes do not include the required information, so failure to provide this information may result in disqualification.

For each job on your resume, provide:

the exact dates you held each job (from month/year to month/year or “present”)
number of hours per week you worked (if part time)

How To Apply

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