Information System Security Officers; ISSO), Senior Security Engineers & Security Engineering L

About Agile Defense

At Agile Defense we know that action defines the outcome and new challenges require new solutions. That’s why we always look to the future and embrace change with an unmovable spirit and the courage to build for what comes next.

Our vision is to bring adaptive innovation to support our nation's most important missions through the seamless integration of advanced technologies, elite minds, and unparalleled agility—leveraging a foundation of speed, flexibility, and ingenuity to strengthen and protect our nation’s vital interests.

Title:

Information System Security Officers (ISSO), Senior Security Engineers & Security Engineering Leads (CBP)

Clearance:
Active CBP Background Investigation (CBP BI) and EOD strongly preferred. We can begin processing for candidates who do not hold one.

Citizenship: U.S. Citizenship required

Location:

Ashburn, VA - Hybrid

Salary Range: [Pending]

Signing Bonus: $10,000 for candidates with an active CBP BI. Payable after 90 days; standard terms apply.

Travel:
Rare, as needed

U.S. Customs and Border Protection runs continuous operations across more than 300 land, air, and sea ports of entry, plus Border Patrol stations and the Air and Marine Operations Center. Security work here carries a cost that security work in a corporate environment does not. A control that blocks something at two in the morning at a remote checkpoint does not inconvenience an employee at a desk.

It stops an officer from doing the thing they are standing there to do. Getting that judgment right, over and over, inside a federal authorization process, is most of the job.

We are hiring on two tracks. Information system security officers own whether systems stay authorized and whether the paperwork describing them is true. Senior security engineers own how systems are hardened, monitored, and fixed. You will work with network engineers, cloud engineers, field deployment teams, and the government security staff who have to be persuaded rather than informed.

One thing is worth knowing before you apply. There is more documentation and process in this work than either track usually wants. An engineer hoping to build tooling all day and an ISSO hoping to write packages undisturbed will both find the job wider than the title suggests.

Objective 1:
Close security findings at their cause rather than at the ticket

• Findings that get closed stay closed, instead of returning in the next scan under a new number.
• Remediation addresses why the condition existed, not only the instance a scanner happened to catch.
• Recurring finding types get traced back to the build, the process, or the standard that produced them.
• Where something cannot be fixed, the reason and the compensating control are written down and hold up when somebody challenges them.

Objective 2:
Get the security answer into a design while it can still change it

• Engineers bring you in early because your answer saves them work, not because a gate makes them.
• Requirements arrive in time to change a decision rather than to document one already made.
• You can tell an engineer what will and will not pass, and be right often enough that they stop checking around you.

Objective 3:
Give the program an accurate picture of its own security posture

• Somebody can ask about the state of a system and get an answer that is current rather than an answer from the last assessment.
• What is recorded as implemented matches what is running.
• Risk that leadership needs to know about reaches them while there is still a decision to make.

This posting covers two disciplines, not two levels. An ISSO and a security engineer are not senior and junior versions of each other. They work opposite halves of the same problem, and the program needs both. Within the engineering discipline, Senior Security Engineer and Security Engineering Lead are levels. Tell us which discipline and level fit you and we will talk about it.

• Information System Security Officer. You own whether your assigned systems stay authorized and stay honestly described. You decide what counts as an acceptable control implementation, what belongs on a POA&M, and when a change needs a…