Cyber Engineer Principal

SAIC · Reston

SAIC has an opening for a highly hands-on, Principal Cyber Engineer who lives and breathes this work—the SME for SMEs. The ideal candidate is someone who experiments at home, maintains a personal mixed OS lab, and genuinely enjoys tinkering with new and opensource security tools, building and breaking environments to learn how things work. This role is well-suited to someone who genuinely enjoys exploring new security capabilities, testing ideas, coding up useful experiments/aides/queries/skills/scripts with AI, and learning emerging patterns in Zero Trust, cloud security, AI platforms, and security data engineering.

***This is a Remote role but candidates must live within commuting range of Reston, VA. Work is primarily from home, but frequently in customer spaces in Virginia or D.C., at the proposal center in Reston, at the Air Force Business Group in Crystal City, or on occasional travel. Candidates must be able to travel occasionally on short notice to support internal and external customer needs.***

Assignments range from two-days to 50 percent time for nine months. Travel is occasional and usually short; some trips come on short notice; occasional trips can last up to six weeks, with longer trips planned in advance. Candidates must have an active Top Secret clearance, with SCI eligibility.

Responsibilities:

Enter customer spaces on short cycle. Learn the stack and the people in days. Leave usable artifacts, not just a briefing deck.
If the space is new, thin, or stuck, drive the cyber team, then hand it back runnable. Consult contract cyber leads; do not replace them.
Assess cyber programs and customer environments against applicable cyber and security frameworks. Recommend solutions, modernization, automation, and next steps to mature the innovation space.
Work in Zero Trust, AI platform security, data engineering for security telemetry, and SIEM / SOC architecture and automation. Support growing efforts in AI governance and securing AI agents and tool gateways.
Apply RMF, CMMC, and ICD-705 in live spaces. Support incident response. Engineer and tune security and cloud architecture, endpoint platforms, DLP, IPS, and load-balancer / traffic paths.
Treat time-indexed data (what happened) and stateful data (what is true now) as complementary, and use platforms and vendor relationships so both exist and feed Zero Trust activity targets.
Troubleshoot with CLI first—Windows, Linux, security-tool CLIs, AWS Console and AWS CLI. Escalate with evidence.
Teach. Present white papers. Write job aids for new and old frameworks. Contribute technically to proposals.

SAIC® is a premier mission integrator focused on advancing the power of technology and innovation to serve and protect our world. Our robust portfolio of offerings across the defense, space, intelligence, and civilian markets includes secure high-end solutions in mission IT, enterprise IT, engineering services, and professional services. We integrate emerging technology, rapidly and securely, into mission critical operations that modernize and enable critical national imperatives.

We are approximately 23,000 strong; driven by mission, united by purpose, and inspired by opportunities. SAIC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, SAIC has annual revenues of approximately $7.3 billion. For more information, visit saic.com. For ongoing news, please visit our newsroom.

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