Network Engineers, Senior Engineers & Architects (CBP)

Agile Defense•Ashburn, VA

18h•Onsite

About The Position

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 the network degrades at one of those sites, officers lose real-time biometric checks against watchlists, agents miss court-mandated deadlines for processing apprehensions, and surveillance feeds go dark. DHS oversight reviews have documented outages that left tens of thousands of travelers queued at a single airport. We are hiring network engineers and architects across several levels to design, build, and sustain that infrastructure. You will work on routing and switching, WAN and LAN transport, wireless, segmentation, and firewalls in a mixed Cisco, Juniper, and Arista environment, alongside field deployment teams, cloud engineers, and security staff. Two things worth knowing before you apply. Change windows in a 24/7 environment are narrow, so the work rewards people who plan carefully over people who move fast. And some of these sites are remote and hard to reach, which means the design that works in a lab is not automatically the design that survives at a checkpoint three hours from the nearest office.

Requirements

Active CBP Background Investigation (CBP BI) and EOD strongly preferred.
U.S. Citizenship required
Experience keeping a distributed network running where downtime had consequences beyond user frustration.
Experience modernizing live infrastructure under change control.
Experience operating in mixed-vendor environments.
Ability to work inside federal change management and accreditation.
Network Specialist: Execute changes and work incidents inside established standards. Know which problems are yours to solve and which need to go up, and escalate before a small issue becomes an outage.
Network Engineer: Own a segment, a site group, or a system. Make routine design calls yourself and bring consequential ones to review.
Senior Network Engineer: Take on problems that arrive without a clear answer. Other engineers check their approach with you before they commit to it.
Senior Network Architect: Set the design that others build against, and be accountable when that design meets an operational reality it did not anticipate.
Lead Network Architect: Own whether the environment holds together as a whole, including parts not designed by you and decisions inherited.

Nice To Haves

Can begin processing for candidates who do not hold an active CBP BI.
Certifications such as CCNP, CCIE, or JNCIP are useful.
Experience at remote or austere sites and can describe what was done differently because of it.

Responsibilities

Keep the network dependable at sites where an outage stops mission work
Incidents get resolved without a second escalation to establish who owns the problem.
Recurring failures get traced to a root cause and closed, rather than reset and re-reported a week later.
Communicate network status to non-technical operators in understandable terms.
Ensure changes made hold up under continuous operational load.
Modernize the network without taking the mission offline
Complete refresh and redesign work inside approved windows.
Design for remote and hard-to-reach sites.
Make capacity and transport decisions before a site outgrows them.
Ensure rollback paths exist and have been tested before a cutover begins.
Close the gap between how the network is documented and how it behaves
Ensure changes are understandable to those not present for the change.
Match diagrams and configuration records to actual deployment.
Document standards where they exist and identify gaps where they do not.
Make troubleshooting knowledge searchable.