Technical Program Director / Lead Systems Engineer

Peraton Labs is seeking a senior technical and strategic leader to serve as the primary customer-facing technical authority for a premier research program operating across classified and unclassified environments for our Maryland-based customer. This role provides infrastructure and research enablement, ensuring the platform is mission-ready, resilient, compliant, and continuously modernized. You'll be the senior technical leader ensuring our research mission can execute reliably by shaping the platform roadmap, leading certification/compliance-heavy initiatives, and keeping both infrastructure and research enablement moving forward with discipline and clarity.

This position combines Lead Systems Engineering responsibilities with program technical leadership. You'll guide technical strategy, lead cross-functional execution and drive high-priority engineering efforts at scale.

This position requires full-time on-site work at a customer site near College Park, MD.

Key responsibilities may include:

Serve as the primary technical interface to the customer, leading technical discussions, briefings, risk decisions, tradeoffs, and roadmap alignment
• Translate evolving mission needs into actionable technical strategy, execution plans, and modernization priorities across research and infrastructure
• Own technical delivery outcomes: availability, performance, compliance posture, platform evolution, and operational excellence
• Act as the senior systems engineering authority for end-to-end architecture across multi-domain environments (unclassified and classified networks)
• Lead engineering efforts for system development, integration, and certification, including high-visibility compliance initiatives
• Lead core infrastructure support services enabling research teams: compute, storage, network services, identity/access patterns, monitoring, backup/restore, and lifecycle refresh
• Improve resiliency and operational maturity: incident response patterns, root-cause analysis, performance tuning, capacity planning, and change control
• Guide modernization efforts while maintaining uptime and mission continuity
• Drive secure baselines across multi-OS environments
• Lead implementation and validation of controls aligned to appliance governance policies, always ensuring audit readiness
• Partner with security/compliance stakeholders to close gaps and continuously improve security posture without breaking research velocity
• Lead and mentor cross-functional teams, ensuring infrastructure priorities align to research execution
• Direct subcontract personnel, establish accountability, and maintain consistent delivery quality through clear technical expectations and operation rhythm

Minimum qualifications

• 20+ years of experience in planning and leading Systems Engineering efforts and a bachelor's degree in Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering Management, or related discipline. Five years of additional relevant experience may be substituted for bachelor's degree, for a total of 25 years of experience
• 5+ years of demonstrated experience working with large complex engineering systems and subsystems with expertise applied across multiple engineering disciplines such as electrical, computer, software, telecommunications, information security, and networking
• Demonstrated success as a hands-on technical leader who can also set strategy and drive execution across teams and stakeholders within complex mission environments
• Proven customer-facing leadership: ability to brief clearly, make tradeoffs, manage expectations, and communicate risk/impact that is clearly understood
• High level of experience within classified environments and the operational realities of compliance, access controls, and mission uptime
• Experience implementing security best practices in high-compliance environments
• Ability to plan work, manage technical risk, and drive accountability across mixed teams of Peraton, subcontract, and customer personnel, to deliver outcomes on schedule
• This position requires an active/current TS/SCI w/ Polygraph

Preferred qualifications

• Experience serving as an engineering director, program engineering lead, or equivalent senior technical authority
• Experience designing secure data management solutions
• Virtualization, hyperconverged infrastructure, enterprise storage platforms and/or research compute environments (HPC)
• Experience supporting research teams and experimental environments where requirements evolve and rapid iteration is needed

Peraton is a next-generation national security company that drives missions of consequence spanning the globe and extending to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. As the world's leading mission capability integrator and transformative enterprise IT provider, we deliver trusted, highly differentiated solutions and technologies to protect our nation and allies. Peraton operates at the critical nexus between traditional and nontraditional threats across all domains: land, sea, space, air, and cyberspace. The company serves as a valued partner to essential government agencies and supports every branch of the U.S. armed forces. Each day, our employees do the can't be done by solving the most daunting challenges facing our customers. Visit peraton.com to learn how we're keeping people around the world safe and secure.