Summary This position is organizationally located in the Office of Information and Technology (OIT), Development, Security, and Operations (DEVSECPOS), Infrastructure Operations (IO), Operations Control and CMOP (OC/CMOP), Operations Control (OC). This position manages, oversees, and facilitates execution and enforcement of policies, standards, and architectures and has supervisory responsibilities over administrative and technical personnel in the accomplishment of these duties. Responsibilities OIT Mission: The mission of the Office of Information and Technology (OIT) is to collaborate with our business partners to create the best experience for all Veterans. OIT Vision: To become a world-class organization that provides a seamless, unified Veteran experience through the delivery of state-of-the-art technology. Major Duties: Responsible for lifecycle management of all field-based applications and benefits processing within OC, including design, implementation, operation, and maintenance of all application services for Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) benefit applications, and Veteran Health Administration (VHA). Manages and supports benefit application software and health application software. Responsible for managing and allocating personnel resources to meet mission goals, procuring assets, establishment of policies and standard operating procedures. Responsible for developing functional roles and responsibilities, and ensuring alignment of benefit/health application software strategy with business strategy and goals. Responsible for budget forecasting, providing service level and operational status reporting, participating in various technology, and developing and implementing comprehensive disaster recovery plans. Supports installing and maintaining the operating system software, the primary database software, core business applications, and any additional layered and interfaced products. Monitors all application services and directs the actions of facility business application support staff, programmers, and field-based developers. Responsible for technical planning, design, development, implementation, and management of software enhancements and patches to meet business requirements for IO facilities. Performs needs analyses to define opportunities for new or improved business process solutions, as well as works with software and operating system vendors to identify and specify requirements. Develops overall functional and program requirements and specifications. Conducts business process engineering, feasibility studies, and trade-off analyses. Prepares business cases for the application of IT soluctions. Defines systems and application scope and objectives. Develops cost estimates for applications systems and software services implementation planning. Work Schedule: Sunday - Thursday 5:00 pm - 1:30 am; Tour of duty may be subject to change based on organizational needs. Compressed/Flexible: As determined by the Agency Policy. Telework: Adhoc Telework may be authorized at management discretion. Travel Required: Up to 25% travel may be required, as needed, for this position. Virtual: This is not a virtual position. Position Description/PD#: Supervisory IT Specialist (OS/Sysadmin)/PD194410 Relocation/Recruitment Incentives: Not Authorized Permanent Change of Station (PCS): Not Authorized Physical Demands: The work is sedentary. Some work may require walking and standing in conjunction with travel and attendance at meetings and conferences away from the work site. Working Environment: The work area is adequately lighted, heated and ventilated. The work environment involves everyday risks or discomforts that require normal safety precautions. Designated Drug Testing Position: Not applicable Requirements Conditions of Employment You must be a U.S. Citizen to apply for this job To be considered for this position, you must complete all required steps in the process. In addition to the application and questionnaire, this position requires an online assessment. The online assessment measures critical general competencies required to perform the job. Selective Service Registration is required for males born after 12/31/1959 Subject to background/security investigation Selected applicants will be required to complete an online onboarding process. Acceptable form(s) of identification will be required to complete pre-employment requirements (https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/form-i-9-acceptable-documents). Effective May 7, 2025, driver's licenses or state-issued dentification cards that are not REAL ID compliant cannot be utilized as an acceptable form of identification for employment. This is not a remote position. This is not a remote position. OI&T has multiple worksites at various duty locations, and the individual(s) selected may be assigned to any federal government work site.This announcement will NOT be used for changing duty locations. If selected, and not on an approved exemption, you will continue to report to your current duty location. Only resumes up to TWO total pages will be accepted. Applicants with resumes exceeding the two page limit will be removed from consideration. Your resume must be 5MB or less. We recommend saving and uploading your resume as a PDF to maintain formatting and number of pages. We also accept GIF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, RTF, TXT, PDF, ODT or Word (DOC or DOCX). We do not accept PDF portfolio files. We recommend using a sans-serif font size like Lato, if available. Make your page margins 0.5 inches. Consider using 14-point size font for titles and 10-point for the main text in your resume. As a condition of employment for accepting this position, you will be required to serve a 1-year probationary period during which you will be evaluated for continued employment advances the public interest. In determining if your employment advances the public interest, we may consider: 1) Your performance and conduct; 2) The needs and interests of the agency; 3) Whether your continued employment would advance organizational goals of the agency or the Government; and 4) Whether your continued employment would advance the efficiency of the Federal service. Qualifications Applicants must meet all requirements by the closing date of this announcement-06/19/2026. Applicants must meet all requirements when a request is received to fill a vacancy. You may qualify based on your experience as described below: Basic Requirements Experience: Experience must be IT related; the experience may be demonstrated by paid or unpaid experience and/or completion of specific, intensive training (for example, IT certification), as appropriate. For all positions individuals must have IT-related experience demonstrating each of the five competencies listed below. The employing agency is responsible for identifying the specific level of proficiency required for each competency at each grade level based on the requirements of the position being filled. Attention to Detail - Is thorough when performing work and conscientious about attending to detail. Customer Service - Works with clients and customers (that is, any individuals who use or receive the services or products that your work unit produces, including the general public, individuals who work in the agency, other agencies, or organizations outside the Government) to assess their needs, provide information or assistance, resolve their problems, or satisfy their expectations; knows about available products and services; is committed to providing quality products and services. Oral Communication - Expresses information (for example, ideas or facts) to individuals or groups effectively, taking into account the audience and nature of the information (for example, technical, sensitive, controversial); makes clear and convincing oral presentations; listens to others, attends to nonverbal cues, and responds appropriately. Problem Solving - Identifies problems; determines accuracy and relevance of information; uses sound judgment to generate and evaluate alternatives, and to make recommendations. AND Specialized Experience: You must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to at least the next lower grade GS-12 in the normal line of progression for the occupation in the organization. At least one full year of specialized experience comparable in scope and responsibility to the GS-12 grade level in the Federal service (obtained in either the public or private sectors). Specialized experience is experience that equipped the applicant with the particular knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to successfully perform the duties of this position. SPECIALIZED EXPERIENCE is defined as: Supervising, leading, or serving as a senior technical lead for enterprise server infrastructure operations in a mission-critical 24/7/365 environment. Demonstrates the ability to manage staff, technical work, shift coverage, queue execution, after-hour escalation, customer communication, and operational accountability for swing shift, midnight shift, weekend, holiday, planned maintenance, emergency maintenance, and unplanned outage operations. Supervising or leading technical personnel such as System Administrators, Senior System Administrators, System Engineers, Maintenance Technicians, Release Managers, Cloud Engineers, Cloud Developers, Cloud Site Reliability Engineers, Functional Area Experts, and contractor support staff responsible for operating, maintaining, securing, patching, monitoring, and restoring enterprise server environment. Assigning work, setting priorities, monitoring ticket queues, evaluating staff performance, enforcing SOPs, coordinating shift handoffs, identifying training needs, managing escalation paths, resolving operational conflicts, and ensuring work is completed accurately and timely during non-core business hours. Staff and operations management for enterprise technologies such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) (version 7 -- 9), Oracle Solaris Unix (Versions 10 and 11), on Intel based systems, i.e. AWS Linux, Azure Linux, Google Linux, Oracle Linux operating systems, and associated servers housed on Linux WMware virtual infrastructure, AWS Infrastructure, Microsoft Azure Infrastructure, Google Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, cloud-hosted Linux workloads, and SPARC-based systems, i.e. Oracle SuperCluster M7 Appliance, Oracle Exadata, Solaris Zones, LDOMs, and related enterprise monitoring, automation, patching, backup, and security tooling. Managing work through ServiceNow or an equivalent IT Service Management platform for tracking, trending and accountability, as well as including incidents, tasks, changes, requests, problem management, vulnerability, and maintenance queues and mitigation strategies. Demonstrates the ability to monitor queue health; assign, reassign, and escalate tickets; track aging work and SLA risk; validate documentation quality; ensure incident and change records are updated; coordinate queue handoffs between day, swing, and midnight shifts; and use queue data to identify workload trends, staffing gaps, recurring incidents, and customer-service risks. Demonstrates the ability to oversee after-hours server operations involving patching, vulnerability remediation, release execution, emergency change coordination, server reboot planning, system restoration, outage triage, hardware and firmware maintenance, vendor escalation, disaster recovery support, backup and recovery coordination, performance troubleshooting, capacity issues, privileged access control, audit evidence capture, and customer-impact communications. Applies operational and cybersecurity practices consistent with VA 6500, NIST SP 800-53, RMF, CIS/STIG/SRG hardening concepts, ITIL service management, DevSecOps, and Site Reliability Engineering principles to ensure infrastructure services remain secure, available, recoverable, auditable, and responsive to mission requirements and VA critical applications, who are responsible for Veteran's care and benefits. Demonstrates the ability to manage operational risk across NIST-aligned areas such as access control, audit and accountability, configuration management, contingency planning, incident response, maintenance, risk assessment, system and communications protection, system and information integrity, and program governance. For more information on these qualification standards, please visit the United States Office of Personnel Management's website at https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/classification-qualifications/general-schedule-qualification-standards/. Note: A full year of work is considered to be 35-40 hours of work per week. Part-time experience will be credited on the basis of time actually spent in appropriate activities. Applicants wishing to receive credit for such experience must indicate clearly the nature of their duties and responsibilities in each position and the number of hours a week spent in such employment. Veterans and Transitioning Service Members: Please visit the VA for Vets site for career-search tools for Veterans seeking employment at VA, career development services for our existing Veterans, and coaching and reintegration support for military service members. Education There is no substitution of education for experience at the grade level of this announcement. Additional Information Under the Fair Chance to Compete Act, the Department of Veterans Affairs prohibits requesting an applicant's criminal history prior to accepting a tentative job offer. For more information about the Act and the complaint process, visit Human Resources and Administration/Operations, Security, and Preparedness (HRA/OSP) at The Fair Chance Act. The Interagency Career Transition Assistance Plan (ICTAP) and Career Transition Assistance Plan (CTAP) provide eligible displaced VA competitive service employees with selection priority over other candidates for competitive service vacancies. To be well-qualified, applicants must possess experience that exceeds the minimum qualifications of the position including all selective factors if applicable, and must be proficient in most of the requirements of the job. Information about ICTAP and CTAP eligibility is on OPM's Career Transition Resources website which can be found at https://www.opm.gov/. Veterans and Transitioning Service Members: Please visit the VA for Vets site for career-search tools for Veterans seeking employment at VA, career development services for our existing Veterans, and coaching and reintegration support for military service members. Special Employment Consideration: VA encourages persons with disabilities to apply, including those eligible for hiring under 5 CFR 213.3102(u), Schedule A, Appointment of persons with disabilities [i.e., intellectual disabilities, severe physical disabilities, or psychiatric disabilities], and/or Disabled veterans with a compensable service-connected disability of 30% or more. Contact the Agency Contact for information on how to apply under this appointment authority via the Selective Placement Coordinator.
