Chief Engineer

Position Overview

The Chief Engineer reports Program Manager to ensure the following outcomes:

• Their team members are empowered to do their best work.
• Their team delivers the best solutions for the customer

The Chief Engineer leads the Tech Leads and is responsible for the overall technical execution of the program. The Chief Engineer is not the most technical or best engineer; instead, they are be well-rounded, having experience leading large technical teams, engaging with customers, and aiding in the creation of technical vision and its implementation. They help Tech Leads lead their individual teams, mentoring where necessary, and creating and communicating the technical vision for the program. The Chief Engineer shall closely work with Program Management ensuring technical deliverables meet customer goals and contractual obligations.They  also collaborate with the Portfolio Principal Mission Architect (PMA) on the solution and vision; ensuring alignment between the project and the broader portfolio vision. The Chief Engineer  works with the Portfolio Mission Architect to understand the program’s applicable Cyber Dominance products/common code and ensure the team understands, utilizes, and contributes towards the common baseline.

The project seeks to implement a consistent, secure, and scalable data transfer and access infrastructure, data ETL mechanisms, and monitoring/metrics, while addressing DOD policy requirements around US persons and Personally Identifiable Information, in alignment with our customer’s mission needs to facilitate operationalization of various government products. Three primary data access modalities are planned (query-in-place, bulk transfer, steaming) encompassing both raw and processed data products. ETL efforts to focus on establishing suitable processing enclaves, transforms to conform to customer data repository schemas, and integration with approved cross domain systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Team Leadership
• Assess, maintain, and nurture a healthy team culture, focused on sustainable delivery of high quality product.
• Meet one-on-one with your Tech Leads monthly at a minimum
• Collaborate with each Tech Lead’s administrative manager to provide effective mentorship and establish tailored development plans
• Provide feedback on your team members’ performance to their managers quarterly at a minimum
• Ensure the following:
• Talent Acquisition hires new team members that meet your team’s technical requirements
• Your team defines and follows an onboarding process for all new team members, with special focus on how they integrate into the larger Clarity team, and how the customers make use of their product and those of sister teams.
• Your team members understand their roles and responsibilities
• Team members have opportunities to use their technical strengths whenever possible
• Team members meet your expectations for technical performance, and that any issues are resolved promptly in coordination with the team member’s manager
• Technical Delivery
• Keep the team on target; communicate priorities and ensure their tasking aligns with it
• Work with the BADLANDS Principle Mission Architect to implement BADLANDS-wide engineering processes, standards, and quality expectations for your team, including tailoring and documenting deviations where appropriate
• Understand your program’s applicable Cyber Dominance products/common code and ensure the team understands, utilizes, and contributes towards the common baseline
• Understand the cybersecurity requirements for your program and ensure the program’s solutions, development, and deployment processes satisfy these requirements
• Maintain enough technical expertise and work with the program’s Technical Leads to maintain awareness of your team’s developer experience and work with the Technical Leads to resolve any issues that arise
• Raise any issues impacting delivery, such as staffing, budget, or scope, to the PM
• This candidate will be responsible for breaking out tasking into 2-weeks sprints, planning work based on customer timeframes, and will need to ensure the rest of the team is organized and delivers on time
• This candidate will be required to present and discuss their technological solutions to key stakeholders and maintain an active strategic technical dialogue with the customer leadership
• Ensure your team does the following:
• Defines and follows a design workflow
• Documents its design and architecture decisions
• Defines and follows a development workflow
• Defines and follows a versioning, release, and deployment workflow
• Product Ownership 
• Establish and communicate the "product" vision
• Represent the team in external, technical engagements
• Ensure the following:
• All features/epics in the program’s backlog are well-documented, refined, and prioritized
• The program has prioritized enablers such as maintenance tasks and automation (e.g., for building, testing, and deploying)
• Your customer receives regular demonstrations of technical progress
• Growth
• Identify opportunities for on-contract growth based on observed gaps in partnership with Mission Architects
• Act as a key contributor to proposals within or related to the program's scope and customer base

Qualifications

• Team Leadership
• Strong communication skills, both written and oral
• Strong interpersonal skills to effectively engage with various stakeholders (customers, PMs, team members, and senior leadership)
• Experience leading teams to delivery
• Experience growing team members through mentorship
• Technical Expertise
• Experience with moving data from commercial data centers into government systems
• Experience with designing and maintaining ETL/ELT pipelines
• Experience with Kubernetes cluster lifecycle (deployment, troubleshooting, scaling)
• Experience delivering containerized applications
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code Utilities (e.g., Crossplane, Pulumi, Terraform)
• Experience in Linux-based development environments (e.g., Ubuntu, RedHat Enterprise Linux, or derivatives)
• Experience developing and troubleshooting Internet-disconnected systems
• Experience writing Automated Tests (e.g., unit tests, acceptance tests, system/integration tests)
• Experience with integrating CI/CD pipelines into a version control repository with emphasis on Continuous Delivery/Deployment experience.
• Experience with implementing and managing the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) with emphasis on Day 2, or sustained operations.
• Familiarity with the Cyber Operations Domain
• Familiarity with Cross-Domain Solution (CDS) dataflows, schemas, and operations
• Technical Delivery
• Experience delivering and managing capabilities in operational/production environments
• Experience leading software design and architecture
• Experience evaluating technologies and making informed decisions
• Strong understanding of at least one Agile methodology (e.g., Scrum, Kanban, SAFe)
• Product Ownership
• Experience translating customer requirements into actionable user stories/features
• Experience breaking down large features into demonstrable and valuable milestones
• Experience prioritizing and delegating tasks for at least a 5-member team
• Growth
• Experience contributing to technical proposals or similar efforts (e.g., technical white papers, rough order of magnitude (ROM) estimates)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with and integrating Cross Domain solutions into products
• Experience implementing ABAC for Data Lakes
• Experience with Apache NiFi
• Experience with Iceberg or Delta Lake
• Experience writing MCP servers
• Experience managing remote team members
• Experience with Big Data analytics or other Data Science disciplines
• Cloud orchestration with AW,/Azure, or GCP
• Use of “serverless” cloud compute technologies (e.g. AWS Lambda)

Additional Qualifications

• Active TS/SCI w/CI Poly
• Available to work onsite at Fort Meade, MD a minimum 3 days per week