Vulnerability Assessment (VA) Team Lead (CBP)

About 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. Every system supporting that mission has weaknesses somewhere, and the job is not to pretend otherwise. It is to find them before someone else does, and to make sure the ones that matter actually get fixed instead of sitting on a list nobody prioritizes.

You lead vulnerability assessment for this program. You will run the scanning, assessment, and prioritization work that finds weaknesses across the environment, and you own getting real remediation out of that work rather than a report that lands and goes nowhere. You will coordinate closely with the network, cloud, and security engineering teams who fix what you find, and hand confirmed exploitable findings to the threat hunt and incident response leads when they need that context.

One thing is worth knowing before you apply. A vulnerability scan is the easy part. What makes this role hard is getting busy engineering teams to prioritize a fix for something that has not caused a problem yet, and doing that without becoming the person everyone tunes out.

What Success Looks Like

Objective 1: Find what actually matters, not just what a scanner flags

• Findings get prioritized by real exploitability and impact to this environment, not just a generic severity score
• You can tell the difference between a finding that is theoretical and one that is genuinely reachable, and you communicate that difference
• Assessment coverage reaches the systems that matter most, not just the ones that are easiest to scan

Objective 2: Get real remediation, not just a report

• Findings that get flagged as critical get fixed, and you can show the trend closing over time
• Engineering teams bring you into the fix, not just the finding, when the remediation is not obvious
• Recurring finding types get traced to a build standard or process gap and closed at the source

Objective 3: Keep the risk picture current and honest

• What is reported as open, in progress, or accepted matches reality at any given time
• Accepted risk decisions are documented with a real justification, not left as findings that quietly stopped getting tracked
• Leadership gets an accurate picture of the environment's exposure, including what has not been assessed yet

Objective 4: Build assessment practice that keeps pace with a changing environment

• New systems and changes get assessed before they go live, not discovered later in a routine scan
• Assessment methodology improves based on what real findings turned out to matter, rather than staying static
• You can name where assessment coverage is thin and what it would take to close that gap

Preferred Experience

• You have led vulnerability assessment or penetration testing work that produced findings engineering teams actually acted on
• You have prioritized findings by real exploitability rather than by scanner severity score alone, and can describe how
• You have worked in a federal or highly regulated environment and know what that adds to remediation timelines and risk acceptance processes
• You have gotten a team to fix something that had not caused a visible problem yet, and can describe how you made the case
• 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 OSCP, GPEN, or equivalent are useful, but they are not a substitute for having driven real remediation

Pay & Schedule

• Location: Ashburn, VA - Hybrid
• Signing Bonus: $10,000 for candidates with an active CBP BI. Payable after 90 days; standard terms apply.
• Travel: Rare, as needed

Employee Benefits

• Health Insurance
• Life Insurance
• Paid Time Off
• Holiday Pay
• Short-term and long-term Disability
• Retirement
• Learning and Development opportunities