Senior Tech Lead – Cyber Systems Engineer

Peraton Labs is seeking a poly cleared Senior Tech Lead – Cyber Systems Engineer to serve as the hands-on senior technical lead for a highly complex environment of classified and unclassified systems. You’ll lead and mentor cross-functional Peraton Labs research, infrastructure, security, and software support teams, interface directly with the customer, and direct subcontractor personnel to ensure systems are mission-ready, resilient, and compliant.

This position requires full-time on-site work at a customer site near College Park, MD.

Key responsibilities may include

Technical leadership & execution

• Act as the senior technical authority for system architecture, engineering decisions, and operation execution across multi-domain environments
• Lead and coordinate teams of internal and subcontractor personnel across our research and infrastructure teams, ensuring infrastructure needs align with execution of research
• Provide hands-on engineering support for complex issues: root-cause analysis, performance tuning, reliability improvements, and lifecycle modernization

Secure systems & security posture

• Engineer and maintain secure system baselines for a multi-OS environment, including hardening, patching, config management, and privileged access control
• Drive compliance and continuous security posture improvements aligned to applicable governance (e.g., RMF/NIST controls, policies, and security plans as outlined by the program/customer)
• Partner with compliance stakeholders to implement and validate technical controls and ensure audit readiness

Infrastructure, networking, and operations

• Lead design, development, integration, and delivery of IT and telecommunications systems/solutions
• Oversee network and systems operations: segmentation, routing/switching/WAN considerations, DNS/DHCP, firewall rulesets, and zero trust-aligned patterns where applicable
• Establish operational practices: monitoring/alerting, backup/restore, capacity planning, and change control

Customer engagement & delivery management

• Serve as a primary technical interface to the customer: brief status, risks, architecture decisions, and tradeoffs
• Direct subcontract personnel and coordinate across stakeholders to deliver outcomes on schedule with high technical quality

Required qualifications

• 20+ years of experience in planning and leading Systems Engineering efforts and a bachelor’s degree in system engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering Management, or related discipline. Five years of additional relevant experience may be substituted for bachelor’s degree, for a total of 25 years of experience
• 5+ years of recent demonstrated experience working with large complex engineering systems and subsystems, with expertise applied across multiple engineering disciplines such as electrical, computer, software, telecommunications, information security, and networking
• Demonstrated success leading technical teams (multi-discipline, mixed prime/subcontract, customer-facing) as a hands-on contributor
• Strong Linux and Windows administration background (build/configure/harden/troubleshoot)
• Experience implementing security best practices
• Proficiency in automation/scripting (e.g., Powershell, Bash, Python) and experience with configuration management and repeatable deployments
• Strong customer communication skills (written and verbal) with the ability to translate complex technical issues into clear risk/impact statements
• Ability to plan work, drive accountability, manage technical risk, and make sound engineering tradeoffs
• This position requires an active/current TS/SCI w/ Polygraph.

Additional desired qualifications

• Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and automation at scale (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD)
• Containerization and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and securing those environments
• Cloud/hybrid architecture and security experience (AWS/Azure/GCP)
• Advanced cyber operations experience (e.g., Red/Purple/Blue team, adversary emulation, pentest tooling, threat hunting)
• Experience building runbooks, standard operating procedures, and repeatable onboarding patterns for systems and staff
• Experience supporting high-compliance or mission environments, including multi-stakeholder delivery and contract/subcontract oversight