Technical Program Director / Lead Systems Engineer

Peraton; Maryland; On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading defense technology firm is seeking a senior technical leader near College Park, MD, to oversee Systems Engineering for a major research program. The position requires extensive experience in technical leadership and active clearance. Responsibilities include serving as the primary interface with customers, transforming mission requirements into executable plans, and ensuring compliance across classified and unclassified settings. Candidates must possess a solid background in engineering and a strong leadership track record in complex mission environments.

Qualifications

• 20+ years in Systems Engineering or related fields with leadership experience.
• 5+ years working with large engineering systems and subsystems.
• Active/current TS/SCI w/ Polygraph required.

Responsibilities

• Serve as primary technical interface to the customer.
• Translate mission needs into actionable technical strategy.
• Own technical delivery outcomes for availability and performance.

Skills

Leadership in technical environments

Experience in Systems Engineering

Customer-facing communication

Risk management

Education

Bachelor's Degree in a relevant discipline

Job description

Minimum qualifications

• 20+ years of experience in planning and leading Systems Engineering efforts and a bachelor’s degree in Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering Management, or related discipline. Five years of additional relevant experience may be substituted for bachelor’s degree, for a total of 25 years of experience
• 5+ years of demonstrated experience working with large complex engineering systems and subsystems with expertise applied across multiple engineering disciplines such as electrical, computer, software, telecommunications, information security, and networking
• Demonstrated success as a hands-on technical leader who can also set strategy and drive execution across teams and stakeholders within complex mission environments
• Proven customer-facing leadership: ability to brief clearly, make tradeoffs, manage expectations, and communicate risk/impact that is clearly understood
• High level of experience within classified environments and the operational realities of compliance, access controls, and mission uptime
• Experience implementing security best practices in high-compliance environments
• Ability to plan work, manage technical risk, and drive accountability across mixed teams of Peraton, subcontract, and customer personnel, to deliver outcomes on schedule
• This position requires an active/current TS/SCI w/ Polygraph

Preferred qualifications

• Experience serving as an engineering director, program engineering lead, or equivalent senior technical authority
• Experience designing secure data management solutions
• Virtualization, hyperconverged infrastructure, enterprise storage platforms and/or research compute environments (HPC)
• Experience supporting research teams and experimental environments where requirements evolve and rapid iteration is needed

Peraton Labs is seeking a senior technical and strategic leader to serve as the primary customer-facing technical authority for a premier research program operating across classified and unclassified environments for our Maryland-based customer. This role provides infrastructure and research enablement, ensuring the platform is mission-ready, resilient, compliant, and continuously modernized. You’ll be the senior technical leader ensuring our research mission can execute reliably by shaping the platform roadmap, leading certification/compliance-heavy initiatives, and keeping both infrastructure and research enablement moving forward with discipline and clarity.

This position combines Lead Systems Engineering responsibilities with program technical leadership. You’ll guide technical strategy, lead cross-functional execution and drive high-priority engineering efforts at scale.

This position requires full-time on-site work at a customer site near College Park, MD.

Key responsibilities may include:

• Serve as the primary technical interface to the customer, leading technical discussions, briefings, risk decisions, tradeoffs, and roadmap alignment
• Translate evolving mission needs into actionable technical strategy, execution plans, and modernization priorities across research and infrastructure
• Own technical delivery outcomes: availability, performance, compliance posture, platform evolution, and operational excellence
• Act as the senior systems engineering authority for end-to-end architecture across multi-domain environments (unclassified and classified networks)
• Lead engineering efforts for system development, integration, and certification, including high-visibility compliance initiatives
• Lead core infrastructure support services enabling research teams: compute, storage, network services, identity/access patterns, monitoring, backup/restore, and lifecycle refresh
• Improve resiliency and operational maturity: incident response patterns, root-cause analysis, performance tuning, capacity planning, and change control
• Guide modernization efforts while maintaining uptime and mission continuity
• Drive secure baselines across multi-OS environments
• Lead implementation and validation of controls aligned to appliance governance policies, always ensuring audit readiness
• Partner with security/compliance stakeholders to close gaps and continuously improve security posture without breaking research velocity
• Lead and mentor cross-functional teams, ensuring infrastructure priorities align to research execution
• Direct subcontract personnel, establish accountability, and maintain consistent delivery quality through clear technical expectations and operation rhythm