Chief Engineer
Herndon, VA OR Columbia, MD
Clarity Innovations
We are your trusted partner for edtech strategy, content, and engineering.Clarity Innovations is a trusted national security partner, dedicated to safeguarding our nation’s interests and delivering innovative solutions that empower the Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of Defense (DoD) to transform data into actionable intelligence, ensuring mission success in an evolving world.
Our mission-first software and data engineering platform modernizes data operations, utilizing advanced workflows, CI/CD, and secure DevSecOps practices. We focus on challenges in Information Warfare, Cyber Operations, Operational Security, and Data Structuring, enabling end-to-end solutions that drive operational impact.
We are committed to delivering cutting-edge tools and capabilities that address the most complex national security challenges, empowering our partners to stay ahead of emerging threats and ensuring the success of their critical missions. At Clarity, we are people-focused and set on being a destination employer for top talent, offering an environment where innovation thrives, careers grow, and individuals are valued. Join us as we continue to lead innovation and tackle the most pressing challenges in national security.
Position OverviewThe Chief Engineer is responsible for the overall technical execution of the RAPTOR program. They build and empower their team members to do their best work and deliver the best solutions for the customer.
The Chief Engineer is well-rounded, having experience leading large technical teams, engaging with customers, and aiding in the creation of technical vision and its implementation. They must help Tech Leads lead their individual teams, mentoring where necessary, and create and communicate the technical vision for the program. The Chief Engineer works closely with Program Management ensuring technical deliverables meet customer goals and contractual obligations.
This program focuses on designing, implementing, and fielding a system which conducts infrastructure provider curation, enables planning, and automatically instantiates pathways as dictated by the plans. The system then cleanly decommissions infrastructure pathways upon request. After development and fielding of acceptable MVP for the DoD customers, the program will then expand product functionality with additional agents and approaches to both data transport and signature reduction techniques. The program will also integrate an infrastructure overwatch system designed to evaluate infrastructure health using commercial and government data sets as well as analytics on infrastructure internal data logs.
As the RAPTOR Chief Engineer, you will play a critical role in empowering cyber mission operators with state-of-the-art tools and infrastructure to drive mission success. This is an opportunity to work at the intersection of cutting-edge technology, security, and operational excellence, shaping the future of Offensive Cyberspace Operations (OCO) and Computer Network Operations (CNO) development and execution.
If you are passionate about optimizing developer workflows, reducing friction in secure software development, and enabling elite cyber operators, we encourage you to apply and be part of our mission-driven team.
Key Responsibilities- Team Leadership
- Assess, maintain, and nurture a healthy team culture
- Build a technical team utilizing both internal company talent and coordinating with recruiting to bring on new talent
- Lead a team of Technical Leads and their teams
- Perform skip level engagement across the teams to elicit constructive feedback
- Technical Delivery
- Keep the team on target; communicate priorities and ensure their tasking aligns with it
- Work with the UMBRA PMA(s) to implement UMBRA-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
- 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 the SMA/PMA/CMA
- Act as a key contributor to proposals within or related to the program's scope and customer base
- 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 providing technical mentorship, formal or informal, to other team members
- Technical Expertise
- Experience with Kubernetes cluster lifecycle (deployment, troubleshooting, scaling)
- Experience with container orchestration using Kubernetes (K8s)
- Experience in containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Podman)
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code Utilities (e.g. Terraform, Ansible)
- 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 troubleshooting network connectivity issues
- Experience with a version control code repository, such as GitLab
- Experience with Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) software
- Experience with implementing and managing the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
- 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)
- Experience developing and fielding managed attribution networks or platforms, or executing operations employing these systems, is highly desired.
- Experience developing offensive cyber operations platforms and systems communicating and passing data between multi-level security domains and enclaves is highly desired.
* Salary range is an estimate based on our InfoSec / Cybersecurity Salary Index 💰
Tags: Agile Analytics Ansible Automation CI/CD Cloud DevSecOps Docker DoD GitLab Kanban Kubernetes Linux NetOps OCO Scrum SDLC Terraform Ubuntu
Perks/benefits: Career development
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