Senior Technical Program Director & Lead Systems Engineer

Peraton; College Park (MD); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 304,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Sign-on bonus (eligible)

Job summary

Peraton Labs in Maryland near College Park seeks a senior technical and strategic leader to serve as the primary customer-facing technical authority for a premier research program. This role shapes the platform roadmap, drives certification and compliance initiatives, and ensures infrastructure and research enablement stay mission-ready and resilient.

You will lead cross-functional teams, oversee end-to-end architecture across unclassified and classified networks, and manage system development,

Qualifications

• 20+ years of experience in planning and leading Systems Engineering efforts (or 25 with alternative path)
• 5+ years leading large complex engineering systems across multiple disciplines
• Hands-on technical leader who can set strategy and drive execution
• Proven customer-facing leadership: briefings, tradeoffs, risk/impact
• Experience in classified environments and high-compliance operations
• Active TS/SCI w/ Polygraph required

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary technical interface to the customer, leading technical discussions, risk decisions, and roadmap alignment
• Translate evolving mission needs into actionable technical strategy and modernization priorities
• Own technical delivery outcomes: availability, performance, compliance posture, platform evolution
• Act as senior systems engineering authority for end-to-end architecture across unclassified and classified networks
• Lead system development, integration, and certification with high-visibility compliance initiatives
• Lead infrastructure support services enabling research teams: compute, storage, network, identity/access, monitoring, backups
• Improve resiliency and operational maturity: incident response, RCA, capacity planning, change control
• Guide modernization while maintaining uptime and mission continuity
• Drive secure baselines across multi-OS environments
• Lead and mentor cross-functional teams and manage subcontract personnel

Skills

TS/SCI with Poly

Customer-facing leadership

Systems Engineering leadership

Strategy and execution

Cross-functional leadership

Education

Bachelor’s in Systems Engineering or related

25 years total experience (with alternative path)

Tools

Virtualization

Hyperconverged infrastructure

Enterprise storage

Research compute (HPC)

Job description

Peraton Labs in Maryland near College Park seeks a senior technical and strategic leader to serve as the primary customer-facing technical authority for a premier research program. This role shapes the platform roadmap, drives certification and compliance initiatives, and ensures infrastructure and research enablement stay mission-ready and resilient.

You will lead cross-functional teams, oversee end-to-end architecture across unclassified and classified networks, and manage system development,