Lead Systems Engineer

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 DevOps/SysAdmin 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.

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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 GitLab

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).

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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 GitLab

CNO experience

Experience facilitating low-to-high development

Cisco networking experience

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About Black Eagle Defense

Black Eagle Defense is a Maryland-based small business that provides Information Technology, Cybersecurity, and related Consulting Services to the private and public sectors. Our team is composed of highly trained professionals with a commitment to continued learning, versatility, and adaptability within the ever-evolving technological landscape.

We are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer.