Senior Systems Engineer with Security Clearance

Join a high-impact, mission-driven team as Lead DevOps Engineer, where you will help manage 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 in Columbia, MD, you will lead a small, agile DevOps/SysAdmin team responsible for end-to-end infrastructure, from bare-metal and AWS environments to Kubernetes deployments.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and direct the daily tasks of two system administrators.
• Collaborate with and support the larger team of 25+ software engineers.
• Provide guidance, advice, and assistance for overall system design and setup in conjunction with software engineering teams.
• Maintain system platforms and health of all servers (EC2, MASH, bare metal), production systems, development environments.
• Facilitate migration of Apache Nifi installations and other services from MASH environment to AWS cloud-based architecture.
• Oversee system maintenance, security, and intelligence accreditations.
• Maintain observability of the system with automation, monitoring, alerting, backup, and disaster recovery strategies for all environments.
• Maintain deployment automation process (e.g., CI/CD in GitLab).
• Perform database administration with databases such as Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis, or graph databases (eg. DGraph).

Required Skills

• Strong Linux system administration experience (e.g., RHEL9).
• Experience in containerization using Podman and Kubernetes for deploying and managing applications.
• Amazon AWS experience (setting up EC2 instances, S3 buckets, VPCs, IAM).
• Proficient in system automation and scripting tools such as Ansible (including Semaphore), Terraform, Packer, Bash, and Python.
• Knowledge of intelligence compliance and processes, including STE/STN.
• Metrics and observability with Kibana, Grafana, and Prometheus.

• Apache Nifi dataflow experience.
• Familiarity with database administration with databases such as Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis, or graph databases (e.g., DGraph).
• Elastic stack experience (logstash, filebeat, etc.).
• Graph database experience.
• Experience with other AWS tools such as EKS, ECS, Lambdas, and Secrets Manager.
• CI/CD in GitLab.
• Vulnerability research or security analysis experience.

Experience Required: 12 years with Bachelor's degree in a technical discipline, or 16 years without degree Location: Columbia, MD Clearance: TS/SCI with Polygraph required Salary Range: $179,000 - $213,000