Lead Systems Engineer -- DevOps & Infrastructure

Lead Systems Engineer — DevOps Infrastructure

Columbia, MD | Full Time | TS/SCI with Polygraph Required

Position: Lead Systems Engineer (System Engineer, Level 3)

Location: Columbia, MD (on-site)

Category: Systems Engineering / DevOps / Infrastructure

Clearance Requirement: Active TS/SCI with Polygraph

Compensation: $181,000 – $220,000 (annualized USD)

Experience Requirement:

• 12+ years with a Bachelor's degree, OR

• 10+ years with a Master's degree, OR

• 4 additional years of relevant experience in lieu of a degree

Description

Join a high-impact, high-priority team as Lead Systems Engineer, where you'll 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'll 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'll collaborate across software teams to help architect robust systems, support development processes, maintain metrics and observability to track uptime and performance, and mentor other team members in modern automation tools (Ansible, Terraform, Podman) as well as testing and deployment strategies. This is a mature project known for its technical stability, team cohesion, and deep integration into high-impact systems.

Responsibilities

• 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 the health of all servers (EC2, bare metal), production systems, and development environments.

• Oversee system maintenance, security, and accreditation compliance.

• Observability of the system - 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 (RHEL 9).

Skills Requirements

• Strong Linux system administration experience (e.g., RHEL 9).

• Proficient in system automation and scripting tools such as Ansible (including Semaphore), Terraform, Packer, Bash, and Python.

• Knowledge of security compliance processes.

• 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 for 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, Lambda, and Secrets Manager.

• CI/CD in GitLab.

• Prior experience in cyber operations or capability development.

• Experience facilitating low-to-high development.

• Cisco networking experience.

Compensation Employment Policy

Salary is determined by multiple factors, including location, education, experience, skills, and organizational requirements. The projected compensation range for this position is $181,000 – $220,000 (annualized USD).

Benefits Overview

At Intezra, Inc., we offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support long-term career growth and work-life balance:

• Three CareFirst medical plans available; Intezra pays up to 100% of healthcare premiums and up to 100% of deductibles (based on plan selection) for employees and dependents

• Intezra pays 100% for CareFirst Dental and Vision plans for employees and dependents

• 401(k): 15% company contribution (no match required)

• PTO: 160 hours, increasing with seniority

• 12 Floating Holidays

• 4 Code Red Days

EEO Statement

Intezra, Inc. provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, pregnancy, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.

About Us

Intezra Inc. is a small business prime contractor for all realms of cyber and AI/ML development, from tactical-level tools and capabilities to enterprise-level infrastructure and operations. Our leadership team and staff have helped solve the most complex challenges for the intelligence community for over 15 years.

Intezra Inc. is a small business prime contractor for all realms of cyber and AI/ML development, from tactical-level tools and capabilities to enterprise-level infrastructure and operations. Our leadership team and staff have helped solve the most complex challenges for the intelligence community for over 15 years.