Sr. Systems Engineer
Location: Fairfax, VA.
Clearance: Top Secret/SCI ATO CI Poly
U.S. Citizenship Mandatory: Due to our US federal government contract, candidates for this position are required to be a US Citizen and will be subject to a background investigation.
Job Description:
This senior engineer will be a hands-on technical leader—equally comfortable designing system architecture and making program-level decisions—while still rolling up their sleeves. The selected hire could be succession-track to replace a most-senior engineer or manager in the coming years (not guaranteed).
You’ll work across the Tactical Mission Framework (TMF)—an operationally supported container orchestration and edge processing environment deployed at multiple government sites. TMF enables DevSecOps pipelines for CI/CD/CO to accelerate secure software/hardware updates, reduce transition timelines, and drive resiliency.
The ideal candidate will:
- Operate independently with evolving tasking; proactive in discovering and solving problems.
- Learns complex systems quickly; produces crisp documentation and actionable plans.
- Balances tactical “do the work” with strategic “shape the architecture” decisions.
Job Responsibilities:
- Serve as a hands-on systems engineering authority: shape and review architectures; make program-level technical decisions across cloud, on-prem, and edge.
- Partner with ground processing system developers to meet evolving mission needs (e.g., modern communications signals) and ground architecture resiliency requirements.
- Containerize components and drive Kubernetes orchestration patterns; guide CNCF-aligned solutions for on-prem and cloud deployments.
- Lead Agile rhythms with developers and customers (weekly/monthly/quarterly): define Jira epics/stories, size effort, and track progress to objectives.
- Perform trade studies, run demos/proofs, and develop prototype tools that de-risk architecture choices.
- Document system architecture, interfaces, CONOPS, trade study plans/results; create Confluence pages that summarize roadmaps, capabilities, and execution plans.
- Learn the team’s skill mix and support tasking & management planning for effective delivery.
- Mesh with an experienced, close-knit team—build trust, elevate quality, and be visibly useful.
Required Skills:
- Experience: Senior 15+ (strongly preferred)
- Recent, hands-on experience as a technical systems engineer (not purely solutions/enterprise architect).
- Linux systems usage/administration.
- Cloud-native design and CNCF ecosystem familiarity.
- Background in software engineering and the full SDLC.
- Ability to integrate Cloud + Linux + toolchains to enable application development across on-prem, cloud, and edge.
- DevSecOps mindset: CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and operational feedback loops.
- Excellent communication and collaboration with customers, technical leadership, and engineering teams.
- Intelligence Community program experience (≥5 years), ideally in NRO ground environments.
- Willingness to obtain CI Poly.
- High-preference/desired experience.
- Kubernetes and container tooling (Docker, Helm, k9s); cluster operations at scale.
- Infrastructure-as-Code (Ansible, Terraform, Puppet); pipeline tooling and automated testing.
- Scripting/programming: Python, Bash (Linux Languages).
- Cybersecurity for cloud-native & on-prem: PKI, container security scanning, zero-trust principles.
- Observability & logging: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch.
- Networking fundamentals (routing, switching, firewalls, VPNs) and secure distributed communications.
- Proven leadership: nurturing customer relationships, guiding teams, influencing outcomes.
- NRO ground systems knowledge; SIGINT tasking/collection/processing/exploitation/dissemination.
- Strong Jira/Confluence skills for technical and programmatic information sharing.
Required Education:
Degree: BS in a technical field required; MS strongly preferred.
ITEC is a wholly owned subsidiary of ManpowerGroup Public Sector.
