Lead Systems Engineer (SE3) [D.26.0187]

Dover Networks LLC; Maryland; On-site; USD 256,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Immediately vested 401(k)

Job summary

Dover Networks LLC is seeking a Lead Systems Engineer to oversee a small DevOps/SysAdmin team and guide cross-functional engineering on scalable, secure infrastructure. The role focuses on stability, observability, and automation across AWS, on-prem/bare metal, and containerized environments.

Highlights include leading two admins, collaborating with 25+ engineers, maintaining SSP compliance, and driving CI/CD pipelines with GitLab. Top Secret/SCI with Full Scope Poly clearance is required.

Qualifications

• 12 yrs. of experience in a technical discipline or 4 additional yrs. in place of a B.S.
• Experience leading a small DevOps/SysAdmin team and mentoring staff
• Strong expertise in Linux system administration and automation tooling

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and direct the daily tasks of two system administrators.
• Collaborate with and support the larger team of 25+ software engineers.
• Provide guidance for overall system design and setup with software teams.
• Maintain system platforms and health of all servers (EC2, MASH, bare metal).
• Oversee system maintenance, security, and SSP accreditations.
• Observability of the system: automation, monitoring, alerting, backup, and disaster recovery across environments.
• Maintain deployment automation process (CI/CD in GitLab).
• Ensure system documentation is up to date and conduct post-mortems to drive continuous improvement.
• Maintain base Linux kickstart images (RHEL9).

Skills

Linux admin

Ansible

Terraform

Kubernetes

Bash

Python

AWS

Kibana/Grafana/Prometheus

Elasticsearch/MongoDB/Redis

SSP compliance

Education

B.S. in a technical discipline

Tools

Semaphore

GitLab

Job description

Requires Top Secret/SCI with Full Scope Poly

Salary Range: $256k-$280k per year with an additional $64k-$70k in immediately vested company 401(k) contributions

Description

Join a high-impact, mission-driven team as Lead Systems Engineer, where you will help manage 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 responsible for end-to-end infrastructure, from bare-metal and AWS environments to Kubernetes deployments. In this role, you will collaborate across software teams to help architect robust systems, support development processes, maintain metrics and observability to track uptime and performance of systems, and mentor other team members in modern automation tools using Ansible, Terraform, and Podman, as well as testing and deployment strategies. This mature project is known for its technical stability, team cohesion, and deep integration into mission-critical systems, offering you the opportunity to make meaningful contributions in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and direct the daily tasks of two system administrators.
• Collaborate with and support the larger team of 25+ software engineers.
• Provide guidance, advice, and assistance for overall system design and setup, in conjunction with software engineering teams.
• Maintain system platforms and health of all servers (EC2, MASH, bare metal), production systems, development environments.
• Oversee system maintenance, security, and SSP accreditations.
• Observability of the system, e.g. automation, monitoring, alerting, backup, and disaster recovery strategies for all development, staging, and production environments.
• Maintain deployment automation process (e.g. CI/CD in GitLab).
• Ensure system documentation is up to date and conduct regular technical reviews and post-mortems to drive continuous improvement in team operations.
• Maintain base Linux kickstart images (RHEL9).

Skills 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).

Nice To Haves

• Nifi dataflow experience.
• Elastic stack experience (logstash, filebeat, etc.).
• Graph database experience.
• Experience with other AWS tools such as EKS, ECS, Lambdas, and Secrets Manager.
• CI/CD in GitLab.
• CNO experience.
• Experience facilitating low-to-high development.
• Cisco networking experience.

YOE Requirement

12 yrs., B.S. in a technical discipline or 4 additional yrs. in place of B.S.