Senior SDN & Systems Engineer — Onsite MD, TS/SCI Poly

Nightwing; Annapolis, Northern (MD, KY); Hybrid; USD 122,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Vision, Dental insurance

401k plan

PTO

Holidays

Additional insurances

Job summary

Nightwing seeks a Senior Network Engineer / Systems Engineer to dive into SDN controller architectures and modular platform internals. You will design and prototype modules, extend northbound APIs, and optimize for mission-critical, high-scale deployments.

The role requires open-source SDN expertise, strong Java and data modeling skills, and the ability to document complex architectural decisions. This onsite position sits at the National Business Park in Maryland and offers a comprehensive

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in network engineering or SDN
• Deep hands-on experience with SDN controller platforms including architecture, deployment, and customization
• Proficiency with network protocols and data modeling standards
• Strong understanding of model-driven architectures and service abstraction layers
• Excellent documentation and communication skills for technical concepts

Responsibilities

• Conduct deep technical analysis of SDN controller architectures and modules
• Evaluate platform capabilities against mission requirements and identify gaps
• Architect and prototype custom modules and plugins to extend platform functionality
• Analyze controller internals and interactions between core services and protocol plugins
• Design and prototype southbound protocol plugins for specialized devices
• Develop northbound API extensions and applications leveraging programmability
• Analyze performance and optimize for high-scale deployments
• Define data models for device configuration and operational state
• Document architectural decisions and trade-offs for platform customizations
• Collaborate with software engineers to implement and test extensions

Skills

SDN platforms

OpenFlow

NETCONF

RESTCONF

BGP

OSPF

SNMP

YANG data modeling

Java programming

RESTful API design

Distributed systems

Microservices

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / Engineering

Tools

OSGi framework

Apache Karaf

Java

Job description

Nightwing seeks a Senior Network Engineer / Systems Engineer to dive into SDN controller architectures and modular platform internals. You will design and prototype modules, extend northbound APIs, and optimize for mission-critical, high-scale deployments.

The role requires open-source SDN expertise, strong Java and data modeling skills, and the ability to document complex architectural decisions. This onsite position sits at the National Business Park in Maryland and offers a comprehensive