Digital Forensics Lead (CBP)

The Role

U.S. Customs and Border Protection runs continuous operations across more than 300 land, air, and sea ports of entry, plus Border Patrol stations and the Air and Marine Operations Center. When something happens on a system supporting that mission, whether it is a confirmed intrusion, an insider case, or an incident that is still being scoped, the question everyone eventually asks is the same: what actually happened, and can you prove it. Getting that answer right, in a way that holds up, is what this role exists to do. You lead digital forensics for this program. You will preserve and analyze evidence from compromised or suspect systems, reconstruct what happened, and produce findings the incident response, threat hunt, and insider threat monitoring leads can act on and that can support disciplinary, legal, or law enforcement action when it comes to that. One thing is worth knowing before you apply. A forensic finding that cannot survive scrutiny is worse than no finding at all, because someone will have already acted on it. Chain of custody and defensible process are not paperwork here. They are the difference between a finding that holds and one that does not.

What Success Looks Like

Objective 1: Preserve evidence well enough that findings hold up under scrutiny

• Evidence handling follows chain of custody every time, not only when a case looks like it will matter
• Your process would survive being challenged by someone whose job is to find the flaw in it
• Nothing you needed for an analysis is missing because it was not preserved in time

Objective 2: Reconstruct what actually happened, not just what is easy to prove

• Your analysis answers the question that was actually asked, not the version of it that was easiest to investigate
• Where evidence is ambiguous, you say so rather than rounding up to a conclusion the evidence does not fully support
• Timelines you build reconcile activity across systems rather than describing one system in isolation

Objective 3: Deliver findings other teams and outside parties can actually use

• Incident response, threat hunt, and insider threat monitoring get findings framed for what they need to act, not a raw technical dump
• Findings that support disciplinary, legal, or law enforcement action are documented to the standard those processes require
• You can explain a technical finding to a non-technical decision maker without losing what matters about it

Objective 4: Build a forensics capability that gets faster and more reliable over time

• Case types that recur get a faster, more consistent process each time, not reinvestigated from scratch
• Tooling and technique choices get reviewed against what actually worked in real cases
• Lessons from a case change the program's practice, not just that one investigation

Preferred Experience

• You have led digital forensic investigations that produced findings used for disciplinary, legal, or law enforcement action, not only internal analysis
• You can describe how you maintain chain of custody and why it matters for a finding to hold up
• You have worked forensics in a federal or highly regulated environment and know what that adds to evidentiary standards
• You have delivered a forensic finding to a non-technical audience, legal, HR, or leadership, and can describe how you framed it
• You hold an active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance. Any of these shortens your start date
• Certifications such as GCFE, GCFA, or EnCE are useful, but they are not a substitute for having produced findings that held up

Pay

Signing Bonus: $10,000 for candidates with an active CBP BI. Payable after 90 days; standard terms apply.

Schedule

Location: Ashburn, VA - Hybrid. Travel: Rare, as needed.