Help Desk Technician Lead

Overview

The Help Desk Technician Lead directs technical and functional support for a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software solution delivered to a U.S. Government customer. The COTS platform integrates with external systems to support the federal acquisition lifecycle.

The Help Desk Technician Lead serves as the senior technical and functional authority on the help desk team and is accountable for completing all of the duties of a Help Desk Technician while also leading the team. The Lead provides expert-level troubleshooting guidance, takes ownership of the most complex and highest-impact problems, assigns resources and workload, and serves as the primary help desk point of contact with the government project manager. The ideal candidate combines strong leadership, deep troubleshooting expertise, clear communication, and extensive familiarity with federal IT support environments.

This position is 100% onsite in Springfield, VA.

What will you do?

Key Responsibilities

• End-user support: Provide responsive Tier 1 and Tier 2 assistance by phone, email, ticketing system, virtual meeting, or other approved channels.
• Incident management: Log, categorize, prioritize, troubleshoot, document, and resolve incidents in accordance with established procedures and service-level targets.
• Service requests: Fulfill routine requests such as account support, access questions, and system navigation assistance.
• Functional support: Help contracting officers, contracting specialists, program managers, and other users understand application workflows, business rules, data requirements, approvals, and reporting features.
• Technical troubleshooting: Diagnose browser, authentication, permissions, connectivity, data-entry, integration, and application-performance issues.
• Escalation: Reproduce issues, capture evidence, assess operational impact, and route unresolved problems to the technical product team.
• User communication: Provide clear status updates, workarounds, resolution instructions, and closure confirmations using language appropriate for both technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Deployment support: Participate in go-live preparation, readiness activities, user onboarding, and post-launch hypercare.
• Knowledge management: Create and maintain knowledge articles, troubleshooting guides, frequently asked questions, and standard responses.
• Problem identification: Analyze recurring tickets and trends; recommend corrective actions, usability improvements, training topics, and automation opportunities.
• Operational reporting: Track ticket volume, aging, resolution time, backlog, customer feedback, and recurring issue categories.
• Team coordination: Collaborate with program leadership, business analysts, developers, trainers, system administrators, cybersecurity staff, and customer stakeholders.
• Continuous improvement: Contribute lessons learned and recommend improvements to support processes, tools, documentation, and user experience.

Lead Responsibilities

• Team leadership: Lead, mentor, and coach the team of help desk technicians, setting expectations for performance, quality, and customer service.
• Expert-level troubleshooting: Provide advanced troubleshooting techniques and guidance to technicians, including root-cause analysis, log and evidence review, and structured diagnostic methods.
• Complex problem resolution: Take ownership of the most difficult, high-impact, and escalated incidents and drive them to resolution in coordination with the technical product team.
• Resource assignment: Assign tickets, tasks, and shifts to technicians based on skills, workload, priority, and service-level targets; adjust coverage during go-live, releases, and surge periods.
• Government communication: Serve as the primary liaison to the government project manager, providing status updates, metrics, risk and issue reports, and recommendations.
• Process and quality oversight: Review ticket quality, enforce support procedures, and ensure knowledge articles and documentation are accurate and current.
• Training and development: Identify skill gaps and train technicians on application workflows, troubleshooting techniques, and new releases.

Do you have what it takes?

Required Qualifications

• Active Top Secret Security Clearance with CI Polygraph.
• Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Business, Finance, Accounting, or a STEM-related discipline plus six years of relevant experience. Four years of relevant professional experience may substitute for the degree requirement.
• Five or more years of experience supporting Intelligence Community or DoD programs, including prior help desk experience.
• Active CompTIA Security+ or SecurityX certification.
• Experience supporting users of web-based enterprise applications in a help desk, service desk, customer support, or application support role.
• Ability to troubleshoot logically, ask effective diagnostic questions, reproduce issues, and document steps and outcomes accurately.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to translate technical concepts for nontechnical users.
• Professional customer service skills, sound judgment, patience, attention to detail, and a strong sense of ownership.
• Ability to prioritize competing requests, meet service expectations, and remain effective during go-live or high-volume support periods.
• Experience using ticketing, knowledge-base, collaboration, and remote-support tools.
• Ability to learn complex federal, DoD, and Agency-specific acquisition and business processes, terminology, roles, and business rules.
• Ability to work effectively with geographically distributed government and contractor teams.
• Demonstrated experience leading or supervising a help desk or technical support team, including assigning work and managing priorities.
• Expert-level troubleshooting skills and a track record of resolving complex, escalated application issues.
• Ability to communicate effectively with senior government stakeholders, including project managers, and to brief status, risks, and metrics.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with federal acquisition processes and the responsibilities of contracting officers, contracting specialists, and program managers.
• Prior experience implementing or supporting federal financial management systems (Oracle, Momentum, SAP, Appian, or similar).
• Experience with identity and access management, single sign-on, role-based permissions, browsers, and common web-application integrations.
• Experience creating knowledge articles, job aids, standard operating procedures, and user training materials.
• Knowledge of software development life cycle (SDLC) practices, principles, and techniques as they apply to Agile development.
• Relevant leadership or service-management certifications such as ITIL Foundation, PMP, or equivalent.
• Relevant certifications such as CompTIA A+, Network+, or Security+.

Work Location and Schedule

• Work will be performed at the customer site in Springfield, VA.
• This is a full-time position supporting customer-defined operating hours, with occasional extended-hours, on-call, weekend, or surge support during software releases and the annual end-of-fiscal-year surge period in August and September.

Pay Range: VTG’s estimated starting pay range is $100,000-$150,000 annually, which is a general guideline for the geographic location. When extending an offer, VTG also considers work experience, education, skill level, market considerations and may possibly include contractual requirements which may cause an offer to fall outside of this range.