Lead Systems Engineer

Description

Lead design, implementation, and lifecycle management of enterprise systems and infrastructure.

Serve as technical authority and hands-on engineer for systems architecture, integration, performance, security, and reliability.

Mentor engineers and administrators, coordinate cross-functional delivery, and drive modernization and automation initiatives.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect, design, and deliver scalable, secure infrastructure solutions across cloud and/or on-prem environments.
• Lead systems integration projects, including requirements gathering, solution design, implementation, testing, and production rollout.
• Define and enforce system architecture standards, best practices, and operational runbooks.
• Implement automation for provisioning, configuration management, deployment, monitoring, and incident response.
• Perform capacity planning, performance tuning, and root-cause analysis for production services.
• Collaborate with Dev Ops, Security, Network, and Application teams to ensure end-to-end reliability and compliance.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to systems engineers and other team members.
• Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident management for critical outages.
• Maintain up-to-date documentation: architecture diagrams, configuration, SOPs, and disaster recovery plans.
• Provide leadership, coaching, mentoring and ongoing support to direct reports.
• Managing employee performance, including conducting performance evaluations, setting goals, delivering feedback, and addressing performance concerns as needed.
• Reviewing and approving employee timesheets.

Required Qualifications:

• Associate’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• IAT Level II certified
• TS/SCI with SAP experience
• 8+ years of systems engineering, infrastructure, or operations experience; 2+ years in a lead or senior technical role.
• Strong hands-on experience with at least one public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and hybrid architectures.
• Expertise in Linux and/or Windows server administration, storage, and virtualization technologies (VMware, KVM, Hyper-V).
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Solid networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, BGP, VPN, load balancing) and security concepts (IAM, encryption, firewalls).
• Demonstrated experience designing high-availability and disaster recovery solutions.
• Strong scripting skills (Python, Bash, Power Shell) and troubleshooting ability.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field.
• Certifications:
  
  AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Pro), Azure Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or equivalent.
• Experience with observability/monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog).
• Background in regulated environments (financial, healthcare, government) and compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO
  27001, FedRAMP).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and platform engineering practices.

Success Metrics / KPIs:

• System uptime / availability % (target e.g., 99.9% or SLAs met).
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) reduction for critical incidents.
• Percentage of infrastructure automated via IaC.

• Percentage of infrastructure automated via IaC.

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For U.S. Positions:
While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education,…