Operations Engineering Senior Advisor

Peraton Overview

Peraton is a next-generation national security company that drives missions of consequence spanning the globe and extending to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. As the world’s leading mission capability integrator and transformative enterprise IT provider, we deliver trusted, highly differentiated solutions and technologies to protect our nation and allies. Peraton operates at the critical nexus between traditional and nontraditional threats across all domains: land, sea, space, air, and cyberspace. The company serves as a valued partner to essential government agencies and supports every branch of the U.S. armed forces. Each day, our employees do the can’t be done by solving the most daunting challenges facing our customers. Visit peraton.com to learn how we’re keeping people around the world safe and secure.

Responsibilities

The Production Operations Lead is accountable for the stability, availability, and recoverability of MARx in production. MARx is the CMS system of record for Medicare Advantage and Part D enrollment, premiums, and plan payments. It serves about 53 million beneficiaries and more than 300 Plan Sponsor Organizations, and supports about $68 billion a month in plan payments. The Lead runs day-to-day production operations across the CMS AWS environment, leads incident and problem management, owns the disaster recovery and continuity program, and makes sure the operational calendar is met on time: daily, monthly, and annual processing, payment files, file exchanges, and New Year Preparation. The Lead also drives the automation and process improvements that move capacity from operations and maintenance toward enhancements.

The Lead works closely with CMS business owners, the CMS Office of Information Technology (OIT), the MAPD Business Operations Support Contractor (MBOSC), CMS help desks and incident response teams, and the partner systems MARx depends on, including SSA, RRB, HPMS, APPS, and the Common Medicare Environment shared with MEPBS.

The position calls for hands-on operational leadership and sound judgment under pressure. Operations work competes with enhancement work for the same team capacity: ServiceNow ticket triage is continuous, security incidents take absolute priority, and New Year Preparation draws heavily on the team from July through March. The Lead must make clear prioritization decisions that protect payment accuracy, beneficiary coverage, and on-time delivery to plans.

Beyond running production, the Lead serves as a trusted operational advisor to program leadership and CMS, mentors production support staff, and drives the reliability and automation improvements that reduce operational workload over the life of the contract. The Lead will have a real opportunity to shape how MARx is operated, reduce operational workload, strengthen disaster recovery, and build a capable operations team.

Key Responsibilities

1. Production monitoring and availability

• Lead real-time monitoring of MARx jobs, system health, cost and usage, and security events using CMS-approved tools (currently Splunk, Splunk On-Call, Datadog, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon QuickSight dashboards). Identify and resolve anomalies and errors before they affect plans or beneficiaries.
• Manage and maintain 99.9% system availability and response time across the production environment, and report performance against that target.
• Maintain scalability and code portability for operations in the cloud environment, working with the DevOps Lead and Architectural Lead.
• Apply the AWS Well-Architected Framework to production operations to achieve operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization in the cloud hosting environment.
• Plan capacity for periodic peak processing loads, such as monthly payment processing, the Annual Enrollment Period, and New Year Preparation.
• Identify the causes of processing errors and correct them quickly to minimize system downtime.

1. Disaster recovery and continuity of operations

• Own the MARx Disaster Recovery (DR) Playbook: organizational roles and contacts, management and escalation, declaration and testing guidelines, notifications, infrastructure and network configuration details, and step-by-step failover and failback procedures.
• Meet the Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives defined in the Business Impact Assessment.
• Lead MARx participation in annual Contingency Plan tabletop tests and in DR exercises CMS requests, and turn the results into corrective actions.

1. Incident, problem, and security event response

• Lead production incident response from detection through recovery. Coordinate the scrum teams, the DevOps and Security Leads, and partner systems.
• Make sure suspected or confirmed security and privacy incidents and breaches are reported to the CMS Incident Response Team, the COR, and the CO within one hour. Make sure HHS CSIRC and CMS IRT alerts and indicators of compromise get a response within 24 hours
• Support the Incident and Breach Response Plan. Provide logs, images, and event data CMS requests. Produce post-incident reports covering impact, threat vector, information affected, lessons learned, and mitigation (J.9).
• Lead root cause analyses for production defects and track preventive actions to closure.
• Make sure users and partners get timely, accurate notice of releases, maintenance, outages, and downtime, and maintain the downtime communications playbook.
• Work with the Architectural Lead and DevOps Lead to turn recurring incident causes into long-term fixes.

1. Operational calendar, batch processing, and file exchanges

• Direct daily, monthly, quarterly, and annual MARx operations, including transmission of plan payment files to the Automated Plan Payment System (APPS) on the monthly payment cycle.
• Oversee inbound and outbound data exchanges with MAOs, SSA, RRB, and internal partners. This includes the shared Split and Push file transmission service, the File Mover process (CMS EFT and S3-to-S3), and partner exchanges defined in the Plan Communications User Guide.
• Lead operational readiness for New Year Preparation and the Beneficiary Rate Increase (July through March), and for the Annual Enrollment Period.
• Coordinate the semiannual lower-environment data refresh, including the de-identification hand-off, and the semiannual and qualifying-beneficiary data archival processes, in line with CMS retention requirements.
• Oversee the premium withhold and premium reduction request process with SSA and RRB, which runs on daily, weekly, bi-monthly, monthly, and annual schedules.
• Proactively identify issues with information exchanges, and test and implement fixes thoroughly to minimize negative impact on partners.

1. Release and change management

• Govern production deployments for the current twice-weekly release cadence: production readiness reviews, post-implementation reviews, and rollback readiness.
• Make sure every production change follows the CMS Target Life Cycle and the MEPS Change Control Board process, and that production-equivalent branches keep their protection rules and CMS approval requirements.

1. Support desk collaboration and ticket backlog

• Serve as the operations point of contact for MBOSC. Provide timely SME support on urgent tickets, lead working sessions with MBOSC and business owners, deliver time-sensitive data fixes, and keep ticket status visible across MARx, MBOSC, and CMS.
• Maintain help desk scripts with the MAPD Help Desk, the CMS IT Service Desk, and other CMS help desks.
• Triage the existing aging tickets during transition-in and draft the backlog reduction plan. Record improvement opportunities in production operations, ticket handling, and automation for the backlog.
• Drive the aging ticket backlog toward the CMS goal of no open tickets more than one year old by the beginning of 2029.

1. Security, compliance, and audit operations

• Make sure production vulnerabilities and findings are remediated within HHS POA&M timelines (critical 15 days, high 30 days, medium 90 days, low 360 days), and that items that can't meet those timelines are tracked in the POA&M.
• Support maintenance of the MARx Authority to Operate and CMS Acceptable Risk Safeguards controls, CMS penetration testing and vulnerability scans, and mandated audits such as CFO and A-123. That includes pulling documentation, running queries, and attending auditor meetings.

1. Cost optimization and operational efficiency

• Manage MARx resource usage responsibly to limit costs CMS incurs, using cost and usage dashboards. Cloud hosting itself is paid under a separate CMS contract.
• Identify and implement automation of operational work, including responsible use of Super Intelligence (SI) (also called Artificial Intelligence) under the approved SI Compliance and Risk Management Plan, toward the CMS goal of moving the O&M-to-enhancement split from about 75/25 to 50/50 by the end of the period of performance.
• Participate in CMS-led innovation efforts and recommend process improvements in operations.
• Evaluate SI and machine learning uses that fit production operations, such as anomaly detection for payment and premium processing, optimization of batch processing schedules, and SI-powered chatbots for user support.

1. Medicare business operations and data integrity

• Maintain a working understanding of the MARx business functions that production supports, and of what an operational failure means for each:
• Enrollment and disenrollment processing, and daily reporting to Medicare Advantage Organizations.
• Premium calculation, premium withholding with SSA and RRB, and Premium Withhold Accounting reconciliation.
• Monthly plan payment calculation, retroactive adjustments, and payment files to APPS.
• Reports and data files to plans and partners, and New Year Preparation.
• Oversee production database availability, backup, and recovery for the MARx data stores (MySQL Community, Aurora MySQL, and Aurora PostgreSQL) in line with the Recovery Point Objectives.
• Promote data integrity so data remains accurate and accessible, and apply practices that prevent data corruption and incidents that require data clean-up.

1. Cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder engagement

• Work with CMS business owners and OIT on operational priorities, production issues, and changes that affect operations.
• Facilitate communication and engagement on operational matters across multiple CMS groups, states, and federal agencies.
• Coordinate with partner and upstream system teams (SSA, RRB, HPMS, APPS, RASS, and MEPBS/CME) on exchange schedules, incidents, and fixes.
• Explain operational risks, incident status, and trade-offs clearly to technical and nontechnical audiences.

1. Program planning and execution support

• Participate in MEPS Program Increment Planning (in person when needed) and follow the MEPS iteration schedule.
• Plan production operations capacity alongside enhancement work, and advise the Program Manager on prioritizing unplanned work.
• Note deviations from the PI plan and report them to CMS OIT staff.
• Provide production operations input to risk and issue management and to the quarterly QASP self-assessment, delivered within one month of each PI ending.

1. Documentation, mentorship, and knowledge sharing

• Maintain current, organized operations documentation for continuity and traceability, including SOPs, data fix documents (DFDs), data validation and verification documents (DFVDs), production readiness reviews (PRRs), and post-implementation reviews (PIRs).
• Mentor production support analysts and engineers, and spread operational knowledge across the scrum teams to avoid single points of failure.
• Contribute production operations content to MARx training, including self-paced computer-based training modules, and train CMS staff as needed.

*This position is contingent on contract award.*

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

Professional Experience

• Minimum of 12 years with BS/BA; Minimum of 10 years with MS/MA; Minimum of 7 years with Ph.D.
• Experience leading production operations for a large, mission-critical system in AWS, including monitoring, incident response, and high-availability operations.
• Demonstrated experience leading production support teams and coordinating incident response across multiple technical teams and external partners.
• Experience owning disaster recovery and continuity: DR playbooks, RTO/RPO, contingency plan testing, and failover/failback execution.
• Experience with release and change management in a SAFe/Agile environment with CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience supporting federal government systems that process personally identifiable information and financial transactions.
• Ability to obtain and maintain the CMS background investigation and HSPD-12 PIV credential required for the position.

Technical Expertise

• Experience operating batch processing and file-based data exchanges with external partners on fixed processing calendars.
• Working knowledge of federal security operations: FISMA, NIST SP 800-53, incident reporting, vulnerability remediation, POA&M management, and ATO support.
• Hands-on knowledge of AWS operations, including compute, containers, serverless, databases, networking, monitoring, and security services.
• Experience with observability tooling, centralized logging, alerting, and on-call management.
• Experience with production database operations, including availability, backup, recovery, and data integrity.

Medicare Domain Knowledge

• Understanding of CMS and Medicare program operations, and of how production issues affect beneficiaries, plans, and payments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with CMS systems and processes, especially Medicare Advantage and Part D enrollment, premium, and payment operations, and the New Year Preparation cycle.
• Hands-on experience with the MARx stack's operations tools: Splunk and Splunk On-Call, Datadog, CloudWatch, AWS Security Hub and GuardDuty, and Amazon QuickSight.
• Familiarity with Aurora MySQL and PostgreSQL, ECS Fargate, Lambda, AWS Batch, SQS/SNS, and CMS Enterprise File Transfer.
• Industry certification such as AWS Certified SysOps Administrator or DevOps Engineer, ITIL 4, or an equivalent.
• Experience leading SRE-style automation that measurably reduced operational workload.
• Direct experience with MARx production operations, including its batch schedule, interfaces, and operational calendar.
• Familiarity with CMS governance: the Target Life Cycle, Technical Reference Architecture, Acceptable Risk Safeguards, and the MEPS Change Control Board process.
• Experience with HHS/CMS incident and breach response procedures, including breach reporting under OMB M-17-12.
• Experience with ServiceNow incident and case workflows.
• Experience applying SI-enabled monitoring or automation, such as anomaly detection, in a regulated environment.

Target Salary Range

$176,000 - $282,000. This represents the typical salary range for this position. Salary is determined by various factors, including but not limited to, the scope and responsibilities of the position, the individual’s experience, education, knowledge, skills, and competencies, as well as geographic location and business and contract considerations. Depending on the position, employees may be eligible for overtime, shift differential, and a discretionary bonus in addition to base pay.
Benefits Statement

Peraton offers eligible employees a variety of benefits including medical, dental, vision, life, health savings account, short/long term disability, EAP, parental leave, 401(k), paid time off (PTO) for vacation, and company paid holidays. A full listing of available benefits can be viewed at https://www.careers.peraton.com/benefits.

Application Statements


EEO

EEO: Equal opportunity employer, including disability and protected veterans, or other characteristics protected by law.