Principal Data Center & Cloud Engineering Lead and Strategist (AI)

Location: Remote within the United States, with required onsite data center assessments and travel to designated facilities; base location and frequency to be confirmed.

Company

hirify.global provides mission-driven technology services for the Department of Veterans Affairs, including infrastructure engineering and operations.

What you will do

• Develop and refresh a ten-year data center and hybrid-cloud estate strategy, translating it into three-year roadmaps, annual priorities, and executable engineering packages.
• Conduct rack-level and onsite data center assessments covering power, cooling, airflow, cabling, connectivity, capacity, equipment placement, and as-built validation.
• Design hybrid compute, storage, network, virtualization, container, backup, and recovery architectures; evaluate workload retention, consolidation, migration, modernization, and retirement.
• Assess AI training, fine-tuning, and inference infrastructure requirements, including GPU capacity, memory, density, power, cooling, networking, storage, resiliency, and cloud-versus-on-premises economics.
• Lead infrastructure automation and reusable Golden Paths for bare-metal, virtual, and cloud provisioning, lifecycle management, testing, policy checks, rollback, ITSM, monitoring, and configuration records.
• Lead multidisciplinary engineering assurance, testing, operational readiness, lifecycle documentation, cost and risk analysis, design reviews, and technical briefings to VA leaders.

Requirements

• 15+ years of progressively responsible infrastructure engineering experience, including 8+ years in data center engineering or architecture and 5+ years leading complex engineering or modernization initiatives; these periods may overlap.
• Recent personal experience conducting data center assessments and practical command of rack elevations, redundant power paths, PDUs, airflow, cooling, cabling, connectivity, equipment placement, capacity, and as-built validation.
• Ability to read and challenge electrical single-line, mechanical, network, and rack documentation with qualified specialists.
• Experience authoring multi-year infrastructure or data center strategies and delivering consolidation, migration, refresh, resilience, or decommissioning initiatives with documented personal contribution and results.
• Substantial experience with at least one major cloud platform and enterprise compute, storage, networking, virtualization, and backup/recovery, including workload placement, hybrid connectivity, resilience, capacity, and lifecycle tradeoffs.
• Hands-on ability to develop or review infrastructure automation, APIs, source-controlled configurations, tests, and recovery logic. Experience with Ansible, Terraform, Python, PowerShell, or comparable tools is required; expertise in every listed tool is not required.
• Ability to reason through AI infrastructure requirements and safely evaluate AI-enabled operational improvements.
• Ability to perform required onsite assessments and travel to designated facilities under applicable safety and access procedures.
• Ability to obtain and maintain Tier 4 / High Risk personnel suitability, credentials, system access, training, and Government background-investigation requirements.
• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, computer science, information technology, or a related discipline, or an allowable equivalent combination of education and experience; strong technical writing and executive communication skills.

Nice to have

• Experience supporting VA, another federal agency, or a large regulated enterprise.
• AI/HPC or GPU-platform planning and deployment; high-density or liquid-cooled infrastructure; thermal or CFD analysis; digital-twin validation; ITSM/DCIM integration; or an engineering or automation Center of Excellence.
• Relevant data center design, cloud architecture, automation, or infrastructure certifications. Certifications supplement, but do not replace, demonstrated site engineering and delivery experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employment reporting to the IE&O Program Manager within a mission-driven Department of Veterans Affairs program.
• Remote working options with onsite facility assessments and travel requirements.
• Healthcare benefits, paid time off, paid holidays, military leave, life insurance, short- and long-term disability coverage, 401(k) match, HSA/FSA, tuition reimbursement, and an employee assistance program.
• Training and certification opportunities, learning investment, and internal mobility.

Hiring process

• Final work location, travel frequency, labor-category alignment, and suitability or access terms require confirmation by HR and Contracts before posting.