Senior Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs in Washington, DC

Engineering the Mission. Enabling Intelligence.

Join Leidos and help shape the future of geospatial intelligence! We are seeking an experienced and innovative Senior Systems Engineer to support the Maru Program with our Intelligence Community customer. If you're passionate about solving complex technical challenges, thrive in a fast-paced Agile environment, and enjoy collaborating with high-performing teams to deliver mission-critical capabilities, this is your opportunity to make a direct impact on national security.

What You'll Do

As a key member of our engineering team, you'll help design, integrate, and evolve cutting-edge systems that enable our customers' mission. You'll work alongside software engineers, cybersecurity professionals, and government partners to transform mission needs into scalable, secure, and resilient solutions using modern engineering practices and DevSecOps principles. At Leidos, you'll have the opportunity to innovate, lead, and grow while contributing to technologies that matter.

Please note Gaithersburg, MD is the program's primary work location.

Active Top Secret/SCI with the ability to successfully pass a Polygraph examination.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Lead systems engineering activities across the full system lifecycle, including requirements analysis, architecture development, integration, testing, deployment, and sustainment.
• Collaborate with Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and Agile development teams to refine features and translate mission needs into technical solutions.
• Develop and maintain system architectures, interface definitions, operational concepts (CONOPS), and technical documentation.
• Perform systems decomposition, functional analysis, allocation, and traceability using industry-standard systems engineering practices.
• Support backlog refinement, sprint planning, and technical roadmap development.
• Lead system performance assessments, troubleshoot complex issues across applications, infrastructure, interfaces, networks, and data flows, identify and mitigate technical risks, and drive solutions that ensure system reliability, mission effectiveness, and operational performance.
• Coordinate integration across multiple development teams and external mission partners.
• Support verification and validation activities, ensuring requirements are fully tested and documented.
• Participate in design reviews, architecture reviews, technical interchange meetings, and customer briefings.
• Support DevSecOps initiatives and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes.
• Ensure compliance with customer and Intelligence Community engineering standards and security requirements.

Required Qualifications:

• US citizenship is required per contract.
• Bachelor's degree in Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering or a related STEM discipline and 8-12 years of prior relevant experience or Master's with 6-10 years of prior relevant experience.
• 8+ yearsof professional systems engineering experience.
• Must have experience supporting the customer's mission systems or GEOINT programs.
• Experience with geospatial intelligence storage, discovery, dissemination and exploitation systems/segments/tools, sensor programs, data/product types/formats and specifications and system/segment interfaces.
• Strong understanding of systems engineering principles and the systems development lifecycle.
• Experience working with Agile frameworks (Scrum, SAFe, Kanban).
• Experience with requirements management tools such as Jira, Confluence, or similar.
• Knowledge of cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GovCloud).
• Experience with system integration, interface management, and enterprise architecture.
• Familiarity with DevSecOps pipelines and CI/CD tools.
• Ability to work effectively in a collaborative, cross-functional team environment.

PreferredQualifications:

• INCOSE Systems Engineering Professional Certification (ASEP, CSEP, or ESEP).
• SAFe Agilist (SA), Scrum Master, or Agile certification.
• Experience with Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and SysML.
• Familiarity with Cameo Systems Modeler or similar modeling tools.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and containerized applications.
• Knowledge of microservices architecture.
• Experience with REST APIs and distributed systems.
• Experience supporting cloud-native or hybrid cloud environments.
• Experience with evaluation, cost analysis and cost impact development, to support system impacts for new and modified requirements levied through the RFC process.

#Maru

#NSBA

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo - because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 - and moving faster than anyone else dares.

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline onlyand not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.