Network Engineers, Senior Engineers & Architects (CBP)

Agile Defense • Ashburn, VA

4d • 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
• Execute changes and work incidents inside established standards (Network Specialist).
• Own a segment, a site group, or a system; make routine design calls (Network Engineer).
• Take on problems without a clear answer; guide other engineers' approaches (Senior Network Engineer).
• Set the design that others build against and be accountable for its operational reality (Senior Network Architect).
• Own whether the environment holds together as a whole, including inherited designs (Lead Network Architect).
• Kept a distributed network running where downtime had consequences beyond user frustration.
• Modernized live infrastructure under change control.
• Operated in mixed-vendor environments and are not dependent on one vendor's tooling.
• Hold an active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance.
• Work inside federal change management and accreditation.
• Certifications such as CCNP, CCIE, or JNCIP are useful but not a substitute for having done the work.

Nice To Haves

• We can begin processing for candidates who do not hold an active CBP BI.
• If you already hold an active CBP BI and EOD, your start date is short and a $10,000 signing bonus comes with the role, payable after 90 days under standard terms.
• If you do not hold an active CBP BI, we can begin processing one for you, which takes months rather than weeks.

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 and estimated fix times to non-technical operators.
• 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 proactively.
• Ensure rollback paths exist and have been tested before cutover.
• Close the gap between network documentation and actual behavior.
• Ensure changes are understandable by those not present for them.
• Maintain diagrams and configuration records that match deployed systems.
• Document standards and identify gaps in documentation.
• Make troubleshooting knowledge searchable.

Benefits

• Health Insurance
• Life Insurance
• Paid Time Off
• Holiday Pay
• short-term and long-term Disability
• Retirement
• Learning and Development opportunities
• other optional benefit elections
• $10,000 signing bonus for candidates with an active CBP BI. Payable after 90 days; standard terms apply.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed