Systems Engineer - Level III (ESY3)

Systems Engineer Level III (ESY3)

Program: Application Arsenal (AA) Enterprise Engineering and Lifecycle Support, NIWC Pacific

Location: San Diego, CA. On-site work is required, and relocation assistance is available. About 75% of the work is on-site at NIWC Pacific Government facilities, including classified labs and SCIFs, and 25% is at the contractor site. CONUS and OCONUS travel is required, including shipboard (afloat) work. Candidates must live in, or be willing to relocate to, the San Diego area before the contract starts.

Clearance: Active TS/SCI, or TS/SCI-eligible with a completed Tier 5 investigation, at the time of proposal submission.

Key Personnel: This is a designated key personnel position. The candidate must commit to the role at contract start and for at least the first 90 days of performance.

About the Role
Application Arsenal is the Navy's enterprise service for distributing, updating, and installing software at the tactical edge. It delivers software over the air to Agile Core Services (ACS), the USMC Common Hosting Environment (CHE), the Overmatch Production Environment, Five Eyes partners, and autonomous vehicles. The Senior Systems Engineer is the technical lead for AA architecture and development. This person guides new releases from design through fielding across unclassified, Secret, and Top Secret environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead the planning, design, development, testing, and integration of new AA releases and enhancements.
• Modernize deployment architectures by integrating with the Government-designated DevSecOps pipeline, ACS, CHE, and other shared Government platforms.
• Design scalable, secure integration pathways for high-priority Navy programs, including interoperability with Five Eyes partners.
• Design and implement secure DevSecOps pipeline capabilities, with automated security gates, within the Government-designated environment.
• Develop and validate secure methods for transferring and replicating software artifacts to ashore, afloat, autonomous, and cloud-hosted environments, including DDIL conditions.
• Engineer cybersecurity controls into releases in line with RMF, and support the ATO artifacts (SCTMs and POA&Ms).
• Lead fielding activities across CONUS and OCONUS sites: installation, configuration, FAT, SAT, and SOVT.
• Provide rapid technical response for RDT&E efforts that develop and integrate new C4I capabilities.
• Serve as a technical presenter in the Government oral presentation, if selected.

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a closely related technical discipline.
• 7+ years of demonstrated experience in full-lifecycle software development for containerized, virtual machine, and cloud-based architectures across multiple security domains (Unclassified, Secret, Top Secret), using Agile methodologies.
• 4+ years of demonstrated experience applying DevSecOps principles. This includes configuring automated security testing tools (SAST, DAST, SCA, and container scanners) as quality gates in CI/CD pipelines within highly regulated, Government-mandated environments, such as Overmatch Software Armory (OSA) or an equivalent DoD enterprise DevSecOps environment.
• 3+ years of demonstrated experience engineering, integrating, and troubleshooting interoperable software systems on critical defense platforms. The environments must include Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent, and Limited-bandwidth (DDIL), afloat, and ashore Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments, or similar and equivalent ones. Examples include Navy ACS, USMC CHE, and architectures designed for Five Eyes interoperability.
• Active TS/SCI, or TS/SCI eligibility with a completed Tier 5 investigation.

• Experience with RMF, eMASS-supported ATO packages, and security control traceability.
• Experience integrating with Cross-Domain Solutions (CDS) and over-the-air software delivery to edge or autonomous systems.
• Shipboard fielding experience, including FAT, SAT, and SOVT