Director Emulation Engineer Jobs in Reston, VA (NOW HIRING)

Peraton Labs is seeking a poly cleared Senior Tech Lead - Cyber Systems Engineer to serve as the hands-on senior technical lead for a highly complex environment of classified and unclassified systems. You'll lead and mentor cross-functional Peraton Labs research, infrastructure, security, and software support teams, interface directly with the customer, and direct subcontractor personnel to ensure systems are mission-ready, resilient, and compliant.

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

Key responsibilities may include

• Technical leadership & execution
  • Act as the senior technical authority for system architecture, engineering decisions, and operation execution across multi-domain environments
  • Lead and coordinate teams of internal and subcontractor personnel across our research and infrastructure teams, ensuring infrastructure needs align with execution of research
  • Provide hands-on engineering support for complex issues: root-cause analysis, performance tuning, reliability improvements, and lifecycle modernization
• Secure systems & security posture
  • Engineer and maintain secure system baselines for a multi-OS environment, including hardening, patching, config management, and privileged access control
  • Drive compliance and continuous security posture improvements aligned to applicable governance (e.g., RMF/NIST controls, policies, and security plans as outlined by the program/customer)
  • Partner with compliance stakeholders to implement and validate technical controls and ensure audit readiness
• Infrastructure, networking, and operations
  • Lead design, development, integration, and delivery of IT and telecommunications systems/solutions
  • Oversee network and systems operations: segmentation, routing/switching/WAN considerations, DNS/DHCP, firewall rulesets, and zero trust-aligned patterns where applicable
  • Establish operational practices: monitoring/alerting, backup/restore, capacity planning, and change control
• Customer engagement & delivery management
  • Serve as a primary technical interface to the customer: brief status, risks, architecture decisions, and tradeoffs
  • Direct subcontract personnel and coordinate across stakeholders to deliver outcomes on schedule with high technical quality

*This position may be eligible for an increased sign-on bonus. Eligibility, bonus amount, and applicable terms and conditions will be discussed during the recruiting process*

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Required qualifications

• 20+ years of experience in planning and leading Systems Engineering efforts and a bachelor's degree in system 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 recent 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 leading technical teams (multi-discipline, mixed prime/subcontract, customer-facing) as a hands-on contributor
• Strong Linux and Windows administration background (build/configure/harden/troubleshoot)
• Experience implementing security best practices
• Proficiency in automation/scripting (e.g., Powershell, Bash, Python) and experience with configuration management and repeatable deployments
• Strong customer communication skills (written and verbal) with the ability to translate complex technical issues into clear risk/impact statements
• Ability to plan work, drive accountability, manage technical risk, and make sound engineering tradeoffs
• This position requires an active/current TS/SCI w/ Polygraph.

Additional desired qualifications

• Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and automation at scale (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD)
• Containerization and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and securing those environments
• Cloud/hybrid architecture and security experience (AWS/Azure/GCP)
• Advanced cyber operations experience (e.g., Red/Purple/Blue team, adversary emulation, pentest tooling, threat hunting)
• Experience building runbooks, standard operating procedures, and repeatable onboarding patterns for systems and staff
• Experience supporting high-compliance or mission environments, including multi-stakeholder delivery and contract/subcontract oversight

#mdpm

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.