Lead Systems Engineer

Black Eagle Defense; Fort Meade (MD); On-site; USD 171,000 - 228,000; Full time

Job summary

Black Eagle Defense in Fort Meade, MD is seeking a Lead Systems Engineer to guide a small, agile DevOps/SysAdmin team. You will own end-to-end infrastructure across bare-metal, AWS, and Kubernetes, ensuring stability and scalable data workflows.

You will architect robust systems, track uptime with metrics and observability, and mentor peers on testing, deployment strategies, and automation tools like Ansible, Terraform, and Podman.

Responsibilities

• Lead a DevOps/SysAdmin team managing end-to-end infrastructure across bare-metal, AWS, and Kubernetes.
• Architect robust systems, maintain metrics and observability to track uptime and performance, and mentor team members on testing, deployment strategies, and automation tools such as Ansible, Terraform, and Podman.

Job description

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.