Senior Systems Engineer

Description

We are seeking an exceptional Senior Systems Engineer to lead our infrastructure and platform engineering teams through the next phase of our technical evolution in Huntsville, AL . This is a high-impact leadership position that combines strategic vision, technical depth, and people management to drive operational excellence across our systems landscape. This position has hybrid options (working both remotely and onsite)

The Senior Systems Engineer will be responsible for but not limited to the following duties:

• Defining the long-term technical roadmap for systems architecture, ensuring infrastructure and platforms can scale with the company’s growth.

• Professional development of engineering leads and individual contributors, fostering a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence.

• The primary interface between systems engineering and other departments like Product, Security, and Finance to ensure technical projects align with business goals.

• Provide the command and control during major architectural failures or critical security incidents.

• The daily and strategic duties of this role are typically divided into three main pillars: leadership, technical oversight, and operational excellence.

• Recruiting, hiring, and onboarding high-performing systems engineering talent to build well-rounded teams.

• Conducting regular performance reviews, setting measurable OKRs, and managing career pathing for direct reports.

• Managing the systems engineering budget, including cloud spend optimization (FinOps) and vendor contract negotiations.

• Advocating for the team’s needs at the executive level while filtering and prioritizing top-down business requirements.

• Reviewing and approving complex architectural designs for distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and automation frameworks.

• Ensuring the reliability, scalability, and security of the systems environment by enforcing best practices in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and CI/CD pipelines.

• Identifying and retiring technical debt by championing modernization efforts like containerization or serverless transitions.

• Establishing technical standards and documentation requirements to ensure consistency across various engineering squads.

• Developing and maintaining robust Incident Response and Disaster Recovery (DR) protocols to meet strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

• Implementing monitoring, observability, and alerting strategies to proactively identify system bottlenecks before they impact customers.

• Overseeing the project management lifecycle for large-scale migrations, data center exits, or global infrastructure expansions.

• Promoting a "DevOps" or "SRE" culture that emphasizes automation over manual toil and values "blameless" post-mortems after system outages.

Qualifications

Required Education:

• Bachelor's degree and eighteen (18) years’ experience; additional four (4) years’ experience can be considered in lieu of degree.

Required Clearance:

• Must possess an active Interim Secret security clearance to start with the ability to obtain and maintain a Secret clearance; US Citizenship required.

Required Skills:

• Expertise in defining long-term technical roadmaps, distributed systems design, cloud infrastructure, and modernizing architecture (e.g., containerization, serverless).

• Proven experience in leading and mentoring engineering teams, conducting performance reviews, managing career growth, and fostering a culture of technical excellence.

• Strong focus on reliability, scalability, security, and deploying best practices for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, incident response, and disaster recovery (DR).

• Ability to interface with Product, Security, Finance, and executive leadership, aligning technical initiatives with business goals, and advocating engineering needs.

• Experience with FinOps (cloud spend optimization), vendor contract negotiations, and managing systems engineering budgets.

REQNUMBER: 2614769

SAIC is a premier technology integrator, solving our nation's most complex modernization and systems engineering challenges across the defense, space, federal civilian, and intelligence markets. Our robust portfolio of offerings includes high-end solutions in systems engineering and integration; enterprise IT, including cloud services; cyber; software; advanced analytics and simulation; and training. We are a team of 23,000 strong driven by mission, united purpose, and inspired by opportunity. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, SAIC has annual revenues of approximately $6.5 billion. For more information, visit saic.com. For information on the benefits SAIC offers, see Working at SAIC. EOE AA M/F/Vet/Disability