Chief Engineer - NASA AEGIS

The Digital Sector at Leidos currently has an opening for a Chief Engineer to lead engineering strategy and execution across all technologies and products included within the Advanced Enterprise Global Information Technology Solutions (AEGIS) program scope. The position is located at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center (MSFC in Huntsville, AL) or Kennedy Space Center (KSC in Cape Canaveral, FL), highly preferred.

The AEGIS program is NASA’s largest IT infrastructure services contract, supporting enterprise IT and mission systems across data centers, cloud platforms, networks, collaboration tools, voice over IP, and cybersecurity. As part of the AEGIS leadership team, you will directly influence how NASA evolves to support missions on Earth, in space, and beyond.

POSITION SUMMARY:

Leidos is seeking an experienced, innovative, and highly technical individual to provide technical leadership to both NASA and Leidos stakeholders, shape long-term modernization initiatives, guide major service upgrades, and ensure enterprise services continually evolve to meet NASA’s mission needs. The ideal candidate is a trusted technical advisor, a strategic thinker, an energetic people leader, and a recognized subject matter expert with broad experience across enterprise IT domains. The Chief Engineer will continuously assess the operational and functional baseline of our managed systems and services. The role is responsible for leading the engineering team while contributing to the program governance structure to ensure adoption of new technologies and/or configurations align with the overall direction of the Agency. The Chief Engineer will be directly responsible for the development, management, delivery, and day-to-day maintenance of the technology roadmap to assist in improved forward schedule planning for enterprise services, which includes planning for the introduction of tools and services to support new and emerging technologies and requirements.

As Chief Engineer for AEGIS, you’ll help shape the future of NASA’s enterprise IT landscape. You’ll influence major modernization initiatives, collaborate with top technical leaders, and lead a large team to ensure NASA’s infrastructure is prepared to support evolving mission needs. This role offers the opportunity to drive significant impact across one of the most innovative and mission-driven IT environments in the world.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:

Strategic & Technical Leadership

• Lead engineering across all AEGIS technologies including data centers, cloud, networking, VoIP, cybersecurity, and collaboration services.
• Build strong relationships with senior NASA and Leidos leadership to ensure alignment with agency priorities.
• Continuously assess enterprise system baselines and recommend improvements to support modernization.
• Translate NASA OCIO and Office of Engineering objectives into actionable engineering priorities, plans, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
• Ensure daily engineering work remains aligned with long term organizational goals.

People Leadership

• Lead a multi-disciplinary engineering team supporting networking, firewalls, VoIP, data centers, and cloud services across NASA.
• Foster a culture of innovation, learning, and technical excellence.
• Mentor engineers at all levels on career growth, skills, and technical decision making.
• Communicate clear expectations, provide timely feedback, and model strong leadership behaviors.
• Promote collaboration across engineering, architecture, security, operations, and program leadership.
• Cultivate accountability, transparency, and a strong customer service mindset.
• Ensure actions have clear owners, due dates, and follow through, reducing tactical burden on the government Engineering Office.

Planning & Architecture

• Perform systems analysis and planning to support NASA’s infrastructure strategy.
• Develop feasibility studies, trend analyses, business cases, benchmarks, and strategic roadmaps.
• Understand contract technical requirements and guide the team toward solutions meeting user needs and contract obligations.
• Review emerging technologies and assess impacts on NASA architectures, standards, and long term service evolution.

Engineering & Integration

• Lead design, development, integration, testing, deployment, and logistics activities.
• Maintain visibility across engineering projects, initiatives, studies, modernization efforts, and operational work.
• Provide leadership with clear views of status, schedules, dependencies, risks, constraints, and required decisions.
• Assess infrastructure impacts of new requirements and NASA network expansions.
• Operate network technology labs for asset management, testing, standards evaluation, requirements analysis, and technology investigation.
• Recommend standards for implementing new services across NASA.
• Ensure engineering coordination across networks, telecommunications, cable plant, data centers, cloud, cybersecurity, and voice/video.
• Identify dependencies and prevent cross-domain engineering conflicts.

Governance & Policy

• Support AEGIS program governance to ensure new technologies align with NASA’s direction.
• Participate in NASA IT policy, architecture, standards, and process reviews; recommend updates to maintain AEGIS compliance.
• Establish consistent engineering practices including design reviews, documentation, standards, configuration management, change control, peer reviews, and decision records.
• Ensure engineering consistency across technical areas.

Risk & Issue Management

• Advise the Program Manager on impacts to stability, cost, architecture, interoperability, or compatibility, and recommend mitigation strategies.
• Implement structured methods for identifying, prioritizing, escalating, and resolving risks and issues.
• Inform NASA and Leidos leadership early when risks may affect mission or service delivery.

Roadmaps & Long-Term Planning

• Develop strategic and implementation plans guiding the future of AEGIS services.
• Assess IT innovations, product releases, and technology changes to introduce new capabilities and retire outdated ones.
• Support development of comprehensive technology roadmaps capturing customer requirements and service evolution.
• Maintain the Five-Year Hardware Lifecycle Plan for AEGIS-supported hardware.

Collaboration & Innovation

• Maintain strong connections with the Leidos Digital Sector CTO and Solutions Architect organizations to leverage enterprise expertise.
• Support program growth by shaping innovative technical solutions and recommending improvements to services and operating models.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor's degree and 12+ years of prior relevant experience.
• At least 7 years of experience managing a large engineering team as part of an IT organization.
• Strong leadership abilities; detail-oriented; effective under deadlines.
• Excellent analytical skills.
• Strong budgeting and organizational skills.
• Demonstrated experience in strategic planning.
• Demonstrated success building relationships with customers and teammates.
• Experience executing development programs in an agile environment.
• Experience developing Estimates to Complete/Estimates at Completion (ETC/EAC).
• Ability to effectively communicate when briefing Leidos and NASA senior leadership.
• Technical knowledge across one or more of the following technologies:
  • Network Solutions (e.g., LAN, WAN, SDA, SD-WAN)
  • Data Center Technologies (e.g., Virtualization, Capacity Management, Data Backup)
  • Cloud-based Architectures (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP)
  • Collaboration Services (e.g., Conferencing, VoIP)

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• ITIL Certification.
• SAFe® Agile Product Manager or Lean Portfolio Manager.
• Project Management Professional (PMP)® Certification.
• Experience working with NASA or other federal agencies.

CLEARANCE REQUIREMENTS:

• U.S. Citizenship is required.
• Must have the ability to obtain and maintain a security clearance ranging from a Public Trust, at minimum, up to a Top Secret clearance , as required.

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 — and moving faster than anyone else dares.

Original Posting:

For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.