Senior Systems Engineer - IT Infrastructure & Applications

nSI empowers customers by supplying products, services, and expertise with powerful, data-driven insights that transform defense systems and improve capabilities. As a 100% ESOP company, we value teamwork and collaboration, offering significant advancement and personal career development opportunities within our dynamic high-tech environment.

About the role

Join our Teams Next - Systems Engineering & Analyses (TN SEA) team in Huntsville, AL or Colorado Springs, CO as a Senior Systems Engineer focused on IT Infrastructure & Applications. You will be part of the IT Strategy & Implementation Team within the Missile Defense Agency's Transformation Task Force (MDA/TF) office, supporting MDA's Office of the Chief Information Officer alongside government civilians and defense contractors.

The role requires a breadth of skills to coordinate across multiple organizations, emphasizing the front end of the engineering lifecycle. You will work directly with stakeholders to elicit and develop requirements, baseline current-state environments, define target-state architectures, and evaluate alternatives.

Responsibilities

• Elicit, develop, and manage requirements for enterprise IT modernization initiatives, translating operational needs into engineering requirements through collaboration with government stakeholders, mission owners, and application owners.
• Baseline the current-state environment through application portfolio analysis, infrastructure inventory, and dependency mapping across facilities, systems, and interfaces.
• Develop target-state architectures and supporting documentation, including architecture diagrams, interface definitions, data flows, and transition roadmaps.
• Conduct Analyses of Alternatives (AoAs) and trade studies to support disposition decisions for legacy applications and infrastructure, including rehost, replatform, refactor, and retire recommendations.
• Support planning and sequencing of data center consolidation and workload migration activities, including migration wave definition, dependency and cutover risk analysis, and coordination of technical dependencies against program cost and schedule.
• Apply systems engineering "V" processes across the acquisition lifecycle, maintaining requirements traceability from stakeholder need through architecture, design, and transition.
• Author and review technical documentation, white papers, and decision briefings for both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior government leadership.
• Coordinate across cybersecurity, infrastructure, applications, and program management stakeholders to ensure modernization efforts are technically sound, secure, and executable.

Requirements

• Master's degree in a STEM field. A BA/BS in a related field with 20+ years of experience may be considered in lieu of the MS degree.
• 12+ years of experience working on missile defense-related or other complex, large DoD programs/projects.
• Ability to work independently, as a team member, or leading teams/tasks, applying engineering rigor to solve engineering/scientific problems.
• Active Secret clearance and eligibility for TS/SCI.
• U.S. citizenship (required for eligibility).

Preferred Qualifications

• Information technology background paired with a formal systems engineering background; ability to operate credibly with both IT infrastructure teams and systems engineering organizations.
• Demonstrated strength in front-end ("left side of the V") systems engineering: requirements elicitation and development, concept of operations, functional decomposition, architecture definition, interface definition, and requirements traceability.
• Program management perspective, with the ability to think in terms of schedule, dependencies, cost, and risk; prior experience in a program or project management capacity is highly valued.
• Experience supporting data center consolidation, closure, or relocation efforts.
• Experience with legacy application modernization and application portfolio rationalization.
• Experience planning or executing workload migrations from legacy on-premises environments to modern hosting environments, including cloud (AWS GovCloud, Azure Government) and virtualized on-premises infrastructure (VMware vSphere).
• Familiarity with the Risk Management Framework (RMF), ATO package development, NIST 800-series controls, and DISA STIGs.
• Familiarity with Zero Trust architecture principles and Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) concepts.
• Working knowledge of DoD Impact Level 5 and 6 (IL5/IL6) hosting environments, virtualization, containerization, and Infrastructure as Code concepts, sufficient to evaluate and direct vendor-proposed solutions.
• Project Management Professional (PMP) certification and/or DoD 8140/8570 baseline certification (e.g., Security+, CASP+, CISSP).
• Prior experience supporting MDA or another large DoD agency in an engineering or advisory capacity.
• Strong oral and written communication skills, including experience briefing senior government stakeholders.

Benefits

• Competitive wages.
• Medical, prescription, dental, and vision insurance with Health Savings Account eligibility.
• Company-funded life, short-term, and long-term disability insurance.
• Personal time off, vacation, and paid holidays.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).
• Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Norton LifeLock identity protection.
• Tuition reimbursement.
• Personal development, technical learning opportunities, and lunch-and-learns.
• Corporate-sponsored events and community outreach.