Network Engineer

About Agile Defense   At Agile Defense we know that action defines the outcome and new challenges require new solutions. That’s why we always look to the future and embrace change with an unmovable spirit and the courage to build for what comes next.   Our vision is to bring adaptive innovation to support our nation's most important missions through the seamless integration of advanced technologies, elite minds, and unparalleled agility—leveraging a foundation of speed, flexibility, and ingenuity to strengthen and protect our nation’s vital interests.
Title: Network Engineers, Senior Engineers & Architects (CBP) Clearance: Active CBP Background Investigation (CBP BI) and EOD strongly preferred. We can begin processing for candidates who do not hold one. Citizenship: U.S. Citizenship required Location: Ashburn, VA - Hybrid with travel Salary Range: $90,000-$150,000 Signing Bonus: $10,000 for candidates with an active CBP BI. Payable after 90 days; standard terms apply. Travel: Regular, expect 35-40%

The Work

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.

What Success Looks Like

Objective 1: 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.
• You can tell a non-technical operator what happened and when it will be fixed, in terms they can act on.