Senior Technical Operations Engineer

About the Role

Leidos has an exciting opening for you, our next TS/SCI cleared Senior Technical Operations Engineer working with a dynamic team to design, develop and deploy a state-of-the-art technology stack supporting the DOMEX Data Discovery Platform (D3P) Modernization program as well as our client's mission to centralize and standardize Tasking, Collection, Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination (TCPED) of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) across the Defense Intelligence Enterprise (DIE). You will have impact as part of a mission focused, solutions oriented, and adaptive team that values inclusion, innovation, collaboration, and professional development. While most work is conducted on-site at our client location in Bethesda, MD, we offer a flexible schedule and, occasionally, some tasks may be performed remotely.

As a Senior Technical Operations Engineer you will be responsible for the availability and performance of a full stack containerized microservice software platform. You will participate in fostering a DevSecOps culture, building strong cross functional collaboration with systems engineering, architecture, development, security, operations, and integration teams, in a dynamic and fast paced environment.

You will work closely with a multi-disciplinary team of systems engineers, developers, integrators, system administrators on the following key tasks:

Responsibilities

• System Reliability & Performance - Maintaining system uptime, performance, and capacity planning for a big data production platform with a microservice architecture running on Kubernetes, Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL backends, Kafka messaging, and using Java, Python, and React as well as low code software technologies (e.g. Appian)
• Monitoring & Observability - Utilizing tools to monitor systems and detect issues proactively.
• Incident Response - Triage and troubleshooting issues, managing failures, performing root cause analysis, and conducting post-incident reviews.
• SLIs and SLOs - Defining and tracking Service-Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service-Level Objectives (SLOs) to measure reliability
• Management Oversight - Leading a team of system administrators who staff a help desk during core business hours; maintaining technical standards and mentoring staff on troubleshooting techniques
• Technical Leadership - Collaborating with system engineers to design solutions for new features and requirements and providing technical input to systems engineering documentation and diagrams/models working in coordination/collaboration with SE team members and architect team
• SAFe Agile - Participating in Agile release planning, scrum of scrums, bug triage, design sessions and other meetings

Qualifications

You bring enthusiasm, the ability to work well with people from different disciplines with varying degrees of technical experience, and meet the following qualifications:

• BS in Engineering, Computer Science, Systems Engineering, or related field or equivalent experience with 12+ years in software development, system engineering or related field. 10+ years of experience with Master's degree. Additional years of experience in lieu of degree are acceptable.
• Must have an active Top Secret/ SCI security clearance with the ability to obtain and maintain a TS/SCI with Polygraph security clearance
• Possess at least one DoD 8570.01-M IAT Level II or higher certification, e.g., CCNA Security, CySA+, Security+ CE, SSCP, CISSP (or Associate)
• Ability to obtain Privileged User Account (PUA) certification per DoD 8570 policy
• Experience with container/container orchestration, specifically Kubernetes, Gitlab pipeline development, and Linux OS
• Experience with production/enterprise systems at scale
• Experience with cloud-based services, preferably AWS, for enterprise applications
• Cloud infrastructure experience
• Comfortable with Elastic Search, PostgreSQL, Logstash, Kibana, and Keycloak
• Demonstrated ability to participate in cross-functional planning, coordination, and task execution
• Team leadership and line management experience
• Strong communication skills, collaboration, and the ability to work under pressure during incidents

Preferred Qualifications

You will wow us even more if you have some of these:

• Experience/knowledge of key Agile processes and techniques
• Experience with development, i.e. Bash, PowerShell, SALT, Python, Groovy, Java, etc.
• Experience with Appian or other low-code software technologies
• Experience with any of the following technologies:
  • Kafka or other message passing systems (AMQP, JMS)
  • Kubernetes monitoring, e.g., Prometheus/Graphana
  • GPU-based Kubernetes
  • SALT for deployment automation
  • Nexus
• Experience with security best practices for services: authN/Z, secrets management, data protection
• GraphQL familiarity
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code (ie CloudFormation, Terraform, Pulumi)
• AWS cloud certifications

About Leidos

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo - because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 - and moving faster than anyone else dares.