Lead VMware Analyst

Location: Saint Petersburg, Florida - United States

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

Job Description Summary

Join our team as a Lead Analyst and take ownership of a large scale VMware virtualization environment that supports critical enterprise workloads across multiple datacenters. You will guide platform strategy, strengthen performance and availability, lead DR initiatives, and drive automation that improves how the entire organization operates. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex virtualization challenges, mentoring others, and shaping a resilient and scalable vSphere environment. If you want real influence, technical depth, and an opportunity to elevate a high impact platform, this is the role for you

Job Description

This position follows our hybrid workstyle policy: Expected to be in a Raymond James office location a minimum of 10-12 days a month.

Please note: This role is not eligible for Work Visa sponsorship, either currently or in the future.

Required Qualifications

• Experience administering VMware vSphere, ESXi, and vCenter in a large multi‑datacenter enterprise environment.

• Strong hands‑on expertise with vSphere clustering, HA/DRS, vMotion, Storage vMotion, Snapshots, and distributed switching.

• Proficiency with PowerShell and PowerCLI scripting for day‑to‑day automation and operational tasks.

• Experience with virtualization capacity planning, performance troubleshooting, and resource optimization.

• Solid understanding of enterprise networking concepts (VLANs, vDS, NIC teaming) and storage integrations (vSAN, SAN/NAS).

• Hands-on experience with enterprise DR technologies (VMware SRM, Zerto, or equivalent).

• Experience with monitoring tools such as vROps, Aria Operations, Log Insight, or similar.

• Familiarity with ITIL processes and CMDB best practices

Key Responsibilities

• Deploy and maintain VMware vSphere environments across multiple datacenters, ensuring high availability, performance, and scalability.

• Manage ESXi hosts, vCenter, clusters, resource pools, distributed switches, and virtual networking configurations.

• Oversee lifecycle management of virtualization infrastructure, including upgrades, patching, remediation, and hardware refresh cycles.

• Monitor and analyze compute, memory, network, and storage utilization across virtualized environments.

• Provide recommendations for capacity expansion, workload optimization, and resource allocation to support business growth.

• Maintain performance baselines and proactively address bottlenecks.

• Design, implement, and maintain DR strategies for virtualized workloads, including replication, failover, and failback procedures.

• Manage solutions such as VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

• Maintain and enhance monitoring solutions (e.g., Aria Operations/vROps, Log Insight).

• Produce capacity utilization reports, performance health metrics, and operational dashboards for leadership visibility.

• Develop and maintain documentation for architecture, configurations, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and runbooks.

• Provide technical leadership to junior engineers and analysts, offering guidance, training, and hands‑on mentorship.

• Develop and maintain automation scripts using PowerShell and PowerCLI

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Infrastructure‑as‑Code tools (Terraform, Packer, Ansible).

• Experience with hybrid cloud VMware solutions such as VMware Cloud on AWS or Azure VMware Solution (AVS).

Education

Bachelor’s: Computer and Information Science, High School (HS) (Required)

Work Experience

General Experience - 6 to 10 years

Certifications

Travel

Less than 25%

Workstyle

Hybrid

At Raymond James our associates use five guiding behaviors (Develop, Collaborate, Decide, Deliver, Improve) to deliver on the firm's core values of client-first, integrity, independence and a conservative, long-term view. 

We expect our associates at all levels to:
•  Grow professionally and inspire others to do the same
•  Work with and through others to achieve desired outcomes
•  Make prompt, pragmatic choices and act with the client in mind
•  Take ownership and hold themselves and others accountable for delivering results that matter
•  Contribute to the continuous evolution of the firm

At Raymond James – as part of our people-first culture, we honor, value, and respect the uniqueness, experiences, and backgrounds of all of our Associates.  When associates bring their best authentic selves, our organization, clients, and communities thrive. The Company is an equal opportunity employer and makes all employment decisions on the basis of merit and business needs. 

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