Data Driven Software Technical Lead

The Leidos Digital Modernization Sector seeks a Data Software Technical Lead with Elastic and Kafka experience to support the Innovations Group on our GSM-O II Program as a technical lead in the End to End Visualization Tenet.  The Leidos Digital Modernization Sector provides a diverse portfolio of systems, solutions, and services covering land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace for customers worldwide. Solutions for Defense include enterprise and mission IT, large-scale intelligence systems, command and control, geospatial and data analytics, cybersecurity, logistics, training, and intelligence analysis and operations support. Our team is solving the world’s toughest security challenges for customers with “can’t fail” missions.

Candidate must be within driving distance of Scott AFB. At a minimum, a Secret clearance is required upon the start of employment and within 14 days following the start date the employee must obtain their Security + certification. 

The ideal candidate brings knowledge in streaming data architectures, cloud-native technologies, and platform engineering, and thrives in guiding teams through technical delivery. This role involves leading design, development, and implementation of secure, scalable data solutions. The candidate will preferably have experience in Defense Information Systems Network (DISN) environments with a background in Systems Engineering, Solution Architecture, Network Engineering, or Software Development to apply their expertise to support complex data integration and interoperability efforts across the project within DoD network infrastructures.

As a key End to End Visualization team member, you will be leading technical design and implementation for a variety of solution capabilities to integrating various data sources into Confluent (Kafka) and Elastic platforms, leading the design of robust data integration solutions, and adhering to the program’s CI/CD processes and data governance practices. You will lead a fast paced, Agile development and implementation team to architect, design and develop data integration solutions (Extract, Transform, Load) to support a unified User Experience / User Interface (UX/UI) that provides a holistic single-pane-of-glass interface for an integrated solution on the Elastic platform. You will also work with operational end users and support teams to perform requirements analysis, as well as design, develop and demonstrate mockups and wireframes.

Primary Responsibilities

The successful candidate primary responsibility will:

• Lead and manage team capacity and workload prioritization.
• Lead a team of analysist, engineers, developers, and testers focused on DISN operations data, Network reliability, availability and observability.
• Lead solution implementation using Confluent Kafka, Elastic Stack, AWS, and Red Hat OpenShift (Kubernetes).
• Partner with product owners, architects, and cross-functional leaders to ensure delivery aligns with strategic goals.
• Lead the development and maintenance of middleware, APIs, and data pipelines to enable interoperability across disparate systems.
• Apply expertise in network security, transport protocols, and DISN architectures to ensure compliance with DoD cybersecurity and data governance policies.
• Leverage AI/ML techniques to optimize data processing, anomaly detection, predictive analytics, and automation in data integration workflows.
• Lead and enforce strong data governance practices, ensuring data accuracy, security, and compliance with DoD and industry regulations.
• Troubleshoot and optimize data flows, network configurations, and system performance issues.
• Research, design, develop and user-test experience and maki strategic user-experience decisions while working closely with product owners, engineers and stakeholders throughout the product lifecycle.
• Create Kafka, Elastic, Logstash data pipelines and support  Kibana visualizations and dashboards using React, JavaScript and HTML.
• Design, develop, document, test and deploy applications and prototypes in JavaScript, HTML and CSS on the Elastic platform.
• Integrating ETL components with CI/CD build/deployment pipelines that use Cloudbees/Jenkins, Artifactory, OpenShift/Kubernetes, Docker and Bitbucket.
• Designing, development, documenting, testing and deploying applications.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college in a relevant technical discipline and 8+ year of related experience obtained through any combination of coursework and internships.
• Must have an active DoD Secret Security clearance.
• Ability to obtain Security+ certification or equivalent DoD 8570 IAT II certification within 14 days of start date.
• Must be able to commute to Scott AFB, IL two/three times per wee