Principal Cyber Security Engineer and Architect

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What you’ll be doing...

The Corporate Security team is seeking an experienced, self-motivated System Architecture Engineer to join the National Security Program Office (NSPO). In this high-impact strategic role, you will be responsible for assessing, defining, and establishing core cybersecurity guidelines, guardrails, and technical standards across all sensitive and mission-critical programs.

Working as a core member of the NSPO, you will bridge organizational security requirements with technical execution. Beyond policy creation, you will directly lead the hands‑on implementation and enforcement of these guardrails across critical enterprise infrastructures to ensure all program environments operate strictly according to guidelines published by CISA, CIS, NIST, and SANS.

Key Responsibilities

• Guardrail & Baseline Creation: Assess program requirements and author technical security guidelines, policy baselines, and architectural guardrails for all sensitive and mission‑critical program environments based on CISA, CIS Benchmarks, NIST (e.g., CSF, 800‑53, 800‑171), and SANS guidance.
• Architecture & Hands‑On Implementation: Translate abstract security guidelines into concrete engineering controls. Lead the technical implementation of hardened network architectures, microsegmentation, zero‑trust patterns, and secure configurations across classified infrastructures.
• Security Assessments & Compliance: Evaluate existing program systems against published CISA/CIS/NIST baselines to identify architectural gaps, drift, or vulnerabilities, driving remediation plans to enforce compliance.
• Cross‑Functional & Security Partnership: Partner directly with Corporate Security, Cybersecurity teams, the Network and Security Operations Center (NSOC), infrastructure groups, and program leadership to align program guardrails with enterprise security strategy, report on compliance posture, mitigate architectural risks, and embed mandatory controls into build patterns, deployment pipelines, and operational workflows.

Where you'll be working...

In this worksite‑based role, you'll work onsite at a defined location which is Ashburn, VA.

What we’re looking for...

You’ll need to have:

• Bachelor’s degree or four or more years of work experience.
• Six or more years of relevant experience required, demonstrated through one or a combination of work and/or military experience, or specialized training in system security engineering or network security architecture.
• Must be able to have or obtain Top Secret Security Clearance

Even better if you have one or more of the following:

• Experience with Windows server operating environments and UNIX/Linux systems engineering (variety of variants).
• Expertise in TCP/IP networking, 4G/5G call flows (SBI, Diameter, SIP), and virtualization technologies like Open Stack and Open Shift / Kubernetes.
• Strong foundational knowledge of incident response life cycles (NIST or SANS) with experience designing, testing, and maintaining automation playbooks using SOAR platforms.
• Hands‑on experience translating cybersecurity frameworks, such as NIST (800‑53, 800‑171, CSF), CIS Benchmarks, CISA…