SIGINT Ground Mission Engineering & Integration Lead

Saic; Chantilly (VA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

SAIC is seeking a SIGINT Ground Mission Engineering & Integration Lead to support a dynamic SIGINT System Program Office in Chantilly, VA. In this role, you will provide essential technical expertise throughout the lifecycle of SIGINT ground capabilities.

Your responsibilities include leading a team, providing guidance on complex engineering decisions, and ensuring robust, scalable solutions aligned with government priorities. Collaboration with various stakeholders and travel to government sites will also be required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a STEM field and at least 14 years of relevant experience.
• Active and current Top Secret/SCI with Poly.
• Strong experience with hybrid and cloud-based architectures.

Responsibilities

• Act as a trusted technical advisor for SIGINT ground mission capabilities.
• Oversee technical architecture and service design.
• Support government in identifying mission needs and optimizing strategies.

Skills

Technical architecture

Cybersecurity knowledge

Collaboration tools (Confluence, Jira)

SIGINT knowledge

Agile methodologies

Education

Bachelor's degree in STEM

Master's degree (preferred)

PhD or JD (considered)

Tools

AWS

Azure

Google Cloud

Cloud Native Compute Foundation services

Job description

Description

SAIC is seeking a SIGINT Ground Mission Engineering & Integration Lead to serve as a team lead supporting a fast‑paced and highly dynamic SIGINT System Program Office in Chantilly, VA.

As the Senior SIGINT Ground Mission Engineering & Integration Lead, you will provide high‑impact technical, architectural, and acquisition expertise across the full life cycle of SIGINT ground hosting, processing, and enabling capabilities. Your work will directly influence the development, integration, and sustainment of the customer’s modern Ground Enterprise.

As a key member of the mission engineering team, you will help guide Government leadership through complex engineering, cloud‑architecture, and programmatic decisions that shape the future of SIGINT ground capabilities. This includes supporting the definition, evaluation, and evolution of mission‑driven technical architectures; spanning hybrid cloud environments, Kubernetes‑based services, CI/CD pipelines, DevSecOps practices, and modern data‑centric engineering approaches.

You will collaborate closely with system engineers, mission partners, acquisition personnel, and cross‑organizational stakeholders to ensure technical solutions are robust, scalable, and aligned with emerging Government priorities. Your work will involve developing and assessing technical approaches, conducting cross‑stakeholder coordination, and presenting unbiased analysis and recommendations that support strategic decision‑making.

In this operational team‑lead capacity, you will oversee day‑to‑day SETA engineering activities, ensuring your team delivers timely, high‑quality analytical and programmatic support to the Government. You will also prepare and deliver technical briefings, integration assessments, and architecture analyses, routinely interfacing with senior Government leaders, developers, and operational personnel.

This role may require short‑term and extended CONUS/OCONUS (10% -20%) travel to Government and contractor locations to support onsite assessments, integration activities, and stakeholder engagements.

Responsibilities

• Serves as one of the Government’s trusted technical advisors for SIGINT ground mission capabilities in the areas of technical architecture solutions that enable the hosting and operations of command and control, mission management, and mission processing systems.
• Assist the government in identifying mission needs and opportunities in developing concepts of operations and optimization strategies, in assessing baseline change impacts, and in developing requirements, to influence current and future ground technical hosting and service design, development, operations and acquisition efforts.
• Perform technical analysis and application of modern architecture best practices and use of FOSS, and COTS to achieve cloud agnostic technical solutions that meet current and rapidly evolving needs. For example, ensuring on-prem components of the hybrid cloud environment and hardware have sufficient capacity and resiliency to ensure the program office can meet the needs current and future missions and acquisitions.
• Play a key role in onboarding, transitioning and integrating new systems into operations, working closely with government mission customers to ensure new capabilities are fully leveraged to meet mission objectives.This role includes engaging with site and operations personnel at various government sites (travel required).
• Assess onboarding and integration activities in the context of cross-system dependencies (technical, resource, and schedule) and present unbiased analysis-based findings and recommendations to government managers.
• Provide “ground truth” technical assessment of project or system reviews, milestones, and/or decision gates; identify risks, issues, opportunities and mitigations; represent the government customer’s interests with other stakeholders.
• Support government requests for system engineering and integrations studies and assessments, process analysis and design, project management assessments, etc.; provide analysis and recommendations, and take necessary actions needed to follow through on accepted recommendations.
• Contribute to the development or assessment of System Concept of Operations, Requirement Documents, Test Plans, Contract Statements of Work, System Engineering Plans, as well as the “staff work” needs of the government (e.g., action items, weekly reports, etc.), including support to government briefings to senior leadership, acquisitions and source selections.
• Collaborate proactively with government personnel and other contractors (often across multiple sites, time zones, organizational levels) to provide unbiased analysis and recommendations on courses of actions to address requests/risks/issues or approaches to exploit an opportunity or satisfy an emerging quick turn need.
• Oversee the day-to-day activities being performed of the System Engineering Technical Advisory (SETA) assigned to the acquisition program.

Qualifications

Required Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) field and fourteen (14) years or more experience; Masters and twelve (12) years or more experience; PhD or JD and nine (9) years or more experience. Relevant experience to be substituted in lieu of degree.
• Active and current Top Secret/SCI with Poly.
• Technical knowledge and experience with modern hybrid and cloud-based architectures with working knowledge in the areas of: Cybersecurity, Cloud-based security best practices, Zero Trust Architectures, IC security directives, Cloud engineering, Agile, CI/CD, DevSecOps, Commercial Cloud Vendors (AWS, Azure, Google, etc.), Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) services, Cloud-based architecture and principles, System Engineering: Management of onboarding for new tenants, Evaluation of external capability transitions to new hosting environments, Management and oversight of government directed deployment processes and requirements, Use of collaboration and agile tools, such as Confluence and Jira, Technical knowledge and experience with SIGINT and SIGINT ground, including supporting frameworks and hosting environments. Experience can be broad, ideally with a COMINT background/knowledge, as well as experience/knowledge to support spacecraft upgrades, TIP support, enterprise testing and requirements sell-off, Must have a working knowledge of mission readiness processes, control gates, associated entry and exit criteria.
• Must be a forward-thinking self-starter, able to proactively address customer requirements without dedicated supervision and be able to readily define and communicate solutions for broad abstract topics.
• Must be a polished, persuasive communicator (both written and verbal) with excellent interpersonal skills and personal judgment. Must be confident in interacting at all levels to include highest levels of government and contractor workforce and skilled at collaboration and coordination with team members and multiple stakeholders (consensus builder).
• Be able to support short‑term and extended CONUS/OCONUS (10% -20%) travel to Government and contractor locations to support onsite assessments, integration activities, and stakeholder engagements.

EOE AA M/F/Vet/Disability