Lead Systems Engineer

Lead Systems Engineer

Job Requirements Fort Meade, MD Top Secret/SCI Full Scope Polygraph Career Level not specified $171,000 - $228,000

SALARY RANGE $171,000 - $228,000/year. DUTIES As a successful candidate for the Lead Systems Engineer role, you will join a high-impact, mission-driven team responsible for managing the stability, security, and scalability of systems powering complex data transformation workflows and a widely used web-based user interface. Embedded within a broader engineering organization of 25+ developers, you will lead a small, agile Dev Ops/Sys Admin team managing end-to-end infrastructure across bare-metal, AWS environments, and Kubernetes deployments.

In this position, you will collaborate across software teams to architect robust systems, maintain metrics and observability to track uptime and performance, and mentor team members on testing, deployment strategies, and modern automation tools such as Ansible, Terraform, and Podman. This mature, mission-critical project offers a fast-paced, collaborative environment where you will drive high-visibility contributions while supporting technical stability and strong team cohesion.

Required Skills SKILLS

• Leadership and mentorship of system administration personnel, including daily task management and operational direction
• Cross-functional collaboration and technical support for large-scale engineering teams (25+ developers)
• System design, setup, and architectural guidance in coordination with software development teams
• Platform administration and system health management across hybrid infrastructure (EC2, MASH, bare-metal) across dev and production environments
• System security oversight, routine maintenance, and System Security Plan (SSP) accreditation management
• Full-stack system observability, including automated monitoring, alerting, backups, and disaster recovery planning across all deployment tiers
• CI/CD pipeline and deployment automation management using Git Lab
• Technical documentation upkeep, technical reviews, post-mortem facilitation, and continuous operational improvement
• Linux system administration and base RHEL9 kickstart image maintenance

QUALIFICATIONS Twelve (12) years of experience as a SE in programs and contracts of similar scope, type, and complexity is required. A bachelor's degree in a related discipline from an accredited college or university is required. Five (5) years of additional SE experience may be substituted for a Bachelor's Degree.

Additional Requirements:

• Strong Linux system administration experience (e.g., RHEL9).
• Proficient in system automation and scripting tools such as Ansible (including Semaphore), Terraform, Packer, Bash, and Python.
• Knowledge of SSP compliance and processes, including STE/STN.
• Experience with containerization such as Podman and Kubernetes.
• Amazon AWS experience (setting up EC2 instances, S3 buckets, VPCs, IAM).
• Metrics and observability with Kibana, Grafana, and Prometheus.
• Familiarity with database administration with databases such as Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis, or graph databases (e.g., DGraph).

Desired Skills NICE TO HAVES

• NiFi dataflow experience
• Elastic Stack experience (Logstash, Filebeat, etc.)
• Graph database experience
• Experience with other AWS tools such as EKS, ECS, Lambda, and Secrets Manager
• CI/CD in Git Lab
• CNO experience
• Experience facilitating low-to-high development
• Cisco networking experience