Lead Systems Engineer

Description

Lead design, implementation, and lifecycle management of enterprise systems and infrastructure. 

Serve as technical authority and hands-on engineer for systems architecture, integration, performance, security, and reliability. 

Mentor engineers and administrators, coordinate cross-functional delivery, and drive modernization and automation initiatives. 

Key Responsibilities: 

• Architect, design, and deliver scalable, secure infrastructure solutions across cloud and/or on-prem environments. 
• Lead systems integration projects, including requirements gathering, solution design, implementation, testing, and production rollout. 
• Define and enforce system architecture standards, best practices, and operational runbooks. 
• Implement automation for provisioning, configuration management, deployment, monitoring, and incident response. 
• Perform capacity planning, performance tuning, and root-cause analysis for production services. 
• Collaborate with DevOps, Security, Network, and Application teams to ensure end-to-end reliability and compliance. 
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to systems engineers and other team members. 
• Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident management for critical outages. 
• Maintain up-to-date documentation: architecture diagrams, configuration, SOPs, and disaster recovery plans. 
• Provide leadership, coaching, mentoring and ongoing support to direct reports.
• Managing employee performance, including conducting performance evaluations, setting goals, delivering feedback, and addressing performance concerns as needed.
• Reviewing and approving employee timesheets.

Required Qualifications: 

• Associate’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• IAT Level II certified 
• TS/SCI with SAP experience 
• 8+ years of systems engineering, infrastructure, or operations experience; 2+ years in a lead or senior technical role.
• Strong hands-on experience with at least one public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and hybrid architectures.
• Expertise in Linux and/or Windows server administration, storage, and virtualization technologies (VMware, KVM, Hyper-V).
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Solid networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, BGP, VPN, load balancing) and security concepts (IAM, encryption, firewalls).
• Demonstrated experience designing high-availability and disaster recovery solutions.
• Strong scripting skills (Python, Bash, PowerShell) and troubleshooting ability.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and cross-functional collaboration skills. 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field. 
• Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Pro), Azure Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or equivalent. 
• Experience with observability/monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog). 
• Background in regulated environments (financial, healthcare, government) and compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO27001, FedRAMP). 
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and platform engineering practices. 

Success Metrics / KPIs: 

• System uptime / availability % (target e.g., 99.9% or SLAs met). 
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) reduction for critical incidents. 
• Percentage of infrastructure automated via IaC. 

• Percentage of infrastructure automated via IaC.

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:

June 22, 2026

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:

Pay Range $107,900.00 - $195,050.00

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.

About Leidos

Leidos is an industry and technology leader serving government and commercial customers with smarter, more efficient digital and mission innovations. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, with 47,000 global employees, Leidos reported annual revenues of approximately $16.7 billion for the fiscal year ended January 3, 2025. For more information, visit .

Pay and Benefits

Pay and benefits are fundamental to any career decision. That's why we craft compensation packages that reflect the importance of the work we do for our customers. Employment benefits include competitive compensation, Health and Wellness programs, Income Protection, Paid Leave and Retirement. More details are available at .

Securing Your Data

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Commitment to Non-Discrimination

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, race, ethnicity, age, national origin, citizenship, religion, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, pregnancy, family structure, marital status, ancestry, domestic partner status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, or any other basis prohibited by law. Leidos will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with relevant laws.