Systems Engineer 3 - (Linux, Ansible, Terraform)Clearance: TS/SCI - Polygraph required
Position ID: 20-19-001-SE3
Location: Annapolis Junction, Maryland
Description:Join a high-impact, mission-driven team as Lead Systems Engineer, where you will help manage the stability, security, and scalability of systems powering complex data transformation workflows and a widely used web-based user interface. Embedded within a broader engineering organization of 25+ developers, you will lead a small, agile DevOps/SysAdmin team responsible for end-to-end infrastructure, from bare-metal and AWS environments to Kubernetes deployments. In this role, you will collaborate across software teams to help architect robust systems, support development processes, maintain metrics and observability to track uptime and performance of systems, and mentor other team members in modern automation tools using Ansible, Terraform, and Podman, as well as testing and deployment strategies. This mature project is known for its technical stability, team cohesion, and deep integration into mission-critical systems, offering you the opportunity to make meaningful contributions in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.
- Lead, mentor, and direct the daily tasks of two system administrators.
- Collaborate with and support the larger team of 25+ software engineers.
- Provide guidance, advice, and assistance for overall system design and setup, in conjunction with software engineering teams.
- Maintain system platforms and health of all servers (EC2, MASH, bare metal), production systems, development environments.
- Oversee system maintenance, security, and SSP accreditations.
- Observability of the system, e.g. automation, monitoring, alerting, backup, and disaster recovery strategies for all development, staging, and production environments.
- Maintain deployment automation process (e.g. CI/CD in GitLab).
- Ensure system documentation is up to date and conduct regular technical reviews and post-mortems to drive continuous improvement in team operations.
- Maintain base Linux kickstart images (RHEL9).
Position Required Skills:- Strong Linux system administration experience (e.g., RHEL9).
- Proficient in system automation and scripting tools such as Ansible (including Semaphore), Terraform, Packer, Bash, and Python.
- Knowledge of SSP compliance and processes, including STE/STN.
- Experience with containerization such as Podman and Kubernetes.
- Amazon AWS experience (setting up EC2 instances, S3 buckets, VPCs, IAM).
- Metrics and observability with Kibana, Grafana, and Prometheus.
- Familiarity with database administration with databases such as Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis, or graph databases (e.g. DGraph).
Nice to Haves- Nifi dataflow experience.
- Elastic stack experience (logstash, filebeat, etc.).
- Graph database experience.
- Experience with other AWS tools such as EKS, ECS, Lambdas, and Secrets Manager.
- CI/CD in GitLab.
- CNO experience.
- Experience facilitating low-to-high development.
- Cisco networking experience.
SE3 Qualifications:Twelve (12) years of experience as a SE in programs and contracts of similar scope, type and complexity is required. Demonstrated experience in planning and leading Systems Engineering efforts is required. Bachelor's degree in System Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering Science, Engineering Management, or related discipline from an accredited college or university is required. Four (4) years of additional SE experience may be substituted for a bachelor's degree.
Salary Range: $242k-$296k (Annually)
The range displayed above is a likely salary range for this position. This is not, however, a guarantee of compensation or salary. Rather, salary will be set based on experience, geographic location and possible contractual requirements and could fall outside of this range.
Akina is a Woman Owned, Service Disabled, Veteran Owned, Small Business, looking for talented and ambitious individuals to join our team. We offer a generous compensation package that includes 24 days PTO accrued annually and 11 federal holidays. Our 401k is 100% vested on your start date and the company makes a direct contribution worth 10% of your salary. Akina covers 100% of healthcare costs for employees and 50% toward dependents. We offer educational assistance towards college classes and will cover costs associated with job related training and certifications.Akina is committed to excellence and creating innovative and flexible solutions for our clients. We are a small company with an open ear to our employees' needs in order to attract and retain quality talent that enables our customer's mission.We are an equal employment opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. 
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