Technical Development Lead - Real-Time Visibility

The Leidos Digital Modernization Sector has a career opportunity for a Technical Development Lead - Real-Time Visibility  supporting the Global Solutions Management - Operations II (GSM-O II) contract with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). The GSM-O II program supports the Operations, Sustainment, Maintenance, Repair, and Defense of the Defense Information System Network (DISN) within the DoD Information Network (DODIN), as well as mission modernization efforts that improve operational effectiveness, resiliency, and service delivery for DISA and its mission partners.

The RTV Technical Lead will serve as a senior technical leader responsible for developing and leading execution of the project data visualization strategy across the Global Management System (GMS) and Real-Time Visibility environment. This role owns technical direction for single-pane-of-glass dashboards, user experiences, visual analytics patterns, data products, reporting, alerting, and integration approaches that transform normalized, correlated, and enriched network, cyber, performance, configuration, event, and operational data into clear, reliable, actionable mission insights.

The successful candidate will lead execution across a complex AWS IL5/IL6 cloud-based system-of-systems that uses Confluent Kafka, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Watson AIOps, Databricks, ServiceNow, Palantir integration, network automation capabilities, and DevSecOps/CI/CD tooling. The role requires a strategic and flexible mindset to maximize existing program tools and investments while also defining the target-state architecture, roadmap, processes, standards, reusable patterns, development practices, and technology adoption path needed to take Real-Time Visibility into the future.

This is a senior technical leadership role for a candidate who can move fluidly between customer engagement, product strategy, architecture, data engineering, software development, UI/UX, visualization design, Agile delivery, security, and operational transition. The RTV Technical Lead will work closely with product owners, the Data Driven Operations Manager, architects, data engineers, visualization engineers, software developers, UI/UX engineers, network engineers, cyber teams, operations users, vendors, and Government stakeholders to define priorities, lead design and implementation, mentor team members, demonstrate capabilities, and deliver measurable mission and business value.

Primary Responsibilities

The successful candidate will:

• Develop, maintain, and lead execution of the RTV data visualization strategy and roadmap across people, process, technology, tools, architecture, and implementation techniques.
• Define current-state and target-state visualization architecture, information architecture, UX/UI patterns, dashboard standards, navigation models, design systems, accessibility expectations, and reusable components for Elastic/Kibana and adjacent visualization tools.
• Lead the design, development, documentation, testing, deployment, and sustainment of Kibana dashboards, visualizations, reports, alerts, self-service analytics, and operational data products that support real-time situational awareness and decision-making.
• Maximize the use of existing program tools and investments, including Elastic/Kibana, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Confluent Kafka, Watson AIOps, Databricks, ServiceNow, Palantir, AWS, Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Jenkins/CloudBees, Artifactory, Ansible, OpenShift/Kubernetes, and related platform capabilities.
• Evaluate new tools, custom development approaches, integration patterns, and modernization opportunities based on mission value, business value, user adoption, total cost of ownership, cybersecurity, operational supportability, performance, scalability, and technical fit.
• Partner with data engineers and platform teams to ensure data pipelines deliver reliable visualization-ready data, influencing data normalization, correlation, enrichment, schema design, metadata, data contracts, lineage, quality rules, retention, and indexing strategies.
• Collaborate with operational users, mission stakeholders, product owners, and subject matter experts to understand workflows, define outcomes, document requirements, create user journeys and personas, develop wireframes and prototypes, conduct demos, and incorporate feedback through iterative delivery.
• Translate stakeholder needs into technical epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, design artifacts, implementation plans, test plans, user acceptance strategies, and operational transition plans.
• Lead cross-functional Agile execution, including technical backlog refinement, team capacity and workload prioritization, sprint planning support, design reviews, code reviews, testing strategy, release readiness, delivery risk management, and continuous improvement.
• Establish and enforce dashboard and visual analytics governance, including standards, review processes, versioning, ownership, access controls, documentation, dashboard rationalization, lifecycle management, performance monitoring, and sustainment practices.
• Design and guide implementation of visual analytics that support network operations, cyber operations, customer impact analysis, root cause analysis, service health, incident management, predictive insights, auto-ticketing, automated troubleshooting, and future self-healing network capabilities.
• Integrate visualizations and decision products into operational workflows so they enable faster detect, troubleshoot, resolve, and report cycles, reduce false positives and false negatives, improve mean time to resolution, and support automated remediation where appropriate.
• Develop and maintain technical artifacts, including architecture decision records, logical and physical visualization architectures, data flow diagrams, system design documents, interface documents, wireframes, dashboard catalogs, implementation plans, test strategies, and operational runbooks.
• Ensure solutions comply with DoD cybersecurity, data governance, role-based access control, encryption, auditability, privileged access, RMF, DISA STIG, and classified/unclassified environment requirements.
• Troubleshoot and optimize dashboard query performance, data quality issues, indexing strategies, visualization load times, user experience issues, data pipeline dependencies, and platform performance constraints.
• Brief program leadership, customers, and Government stakeholders on visualization strategy, status, risks, tradeoffs, design decisions, demonstrations, roadmap options, and recommended courses of action.
• Support Engineering Review Board activities, technology trade studies, analysis of alternatives, ROM and proposal inputs, roadmap planning, and modernization recommendations for new and enhanced GSM-O capabilities.
• Maintain a forward-looking perspective on emerging data visualization, observability, UX/UI, AI/ML, AIOps, LLM-enabled operations support, automation, and network operations technologies, and recommend pragmatic adoption paths that improve mission outcomes.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline with 8+ years of relevant experience; Master’s degree with 6+ years; or equivalent additional experience in lieu of degree. Final experience requirement should be validated against the selected Leidos job profile.
• Demonstrated experience leading strategy, architecture, design, development, and delivery of data visualization, observability, analytics, or data-driven operations capabilities in complex enterprise or mission environments.
• Hands-on experience designing, building, deploying, and sustaining operational dashboards, reports, visualizations, and data products using Elastic/Kibana or comparable enterprise visualization platforms.
• Experience with the Elastic Stack, including Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, indexing strategies, dashboarding, alerting, role-based access, retention, observability, and performance tuning.
• Experience with real-time or near-real-time operational data, such as network events, performance metrics, configuration data, telemetry, syslog, SNMP polling/traps, incident/ticketing data, cybersecurity data, or customer impact data.
• Experience translating mission, business, and user needs into technical requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, architecture/design artifacts, development tasks, and implementation plans.
• Experience with user-centered design practices, including stakeholder interviews, workflow analysis, personas, user journeys, wireframes, prototypes, usability reviews, visual design principles, accessibility, and iterative feedback loops.
• Experience leading technical teams or cross-functional delivery efforts, including mentoring engineers, influencing without direct authority, facilitating design decisions, resolving technical issues, managing delivery risk, and aligning execution to business outcomes.
• Experience with data integration and pipeline concepts, including Kafka or comparable messaging platforms, ETL/ELT, APIs, data modeling, schema management, metadata, data quality, data lineage, and secure access patterns.
• Software development or scripting experience using JavaScript, React, HTML, CSS, JSON/REST APIs, Python, Java, SQL, or comparable languages used for visualization, automation, platform integration, and data engineering.
• Experience with DevSecOps and Agile delivery practices, including Git/Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence, Jenkins/CloudBees or equivalent CI/CD tooling, Artifactory, Ansible, automated testing, controlled release processes, and infrastructure/configuration as code concepts.
• Experience with cloud and containerized environments such as AWS, AWS GovCloud, OpenShift, Kubernetes, Docker, or comparable technologies.
• Working knowledge of cybersecurity and compliance principles, including access controls, encryption, least privilege, auditability, RMF, DISA STIGs, DoD IA policies, or comparable secure mission environment requirements.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to brief technical solutions, tradeoffs, risks, status, and recommendations to customers, senior leadership, architects, engineers, operators, and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DoD Secret security clearance; active Secret clearance preferred for start.
• Ability to obtain Security+ or equivalent DoD 8570 IAT II certification within the program-required timeframe after start.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting DISA, DISN, DODIN, GSM-O, GMS, DoD network operations, cyber operations, or mission command-and-control environments.
• Deep understanding of network operations data and workflows, including service health, event correlation, topology, customer impact, incident management, root cause analysis, performance management, configuration management, and operational reporting.
• Experience with tools or data sources such as DXNetOps, Netscout, Netcool, Watson AIOps, Syslog, SNMP polling/traps, Juniper Northstar, CTPView, Cisco EPNM, Ciena MCP, Silvx, Cisco Prime Optical, ServiceNow ITSM/TSOM/TNI/OMT, Palantir, Cisco NSO, and Ansible.
• Elastic/Kibana certification or demonstrated expert-level experience with Elastic/Kibana dashboard development, Kibana Lens, Canvas, Maps, alerting, Spaces, security, saved objects, APIs, custom plugins, or advanced visualization patterns.
• Experience with Confluent Kafka or Apache Kafka, including topics, partitions, connectors, schema management, stream processing, Kafka Streams, ksqlDB/KSQL, and operational troubleshooting.
• Experience with Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog or comparable data catalog/governance capabilities, Apache NiFi, Apache Flink, or similar data engineering technologies.
• Experience designing visual analytics and operational data products that support predictive analytics, anomaly detection, AIOps, event correlation, auto-ticketing, automated troubleshooting, automated remediation, or self-healing network capabilities.
• Familiarity with AI/ML, NLP, LLM-enabled operational support, Elastic AI Assistant or similar capabilities, feature engineering, model-ready data preparation, and governance of data used for machine learning workloads.
• Experience optimizing Elastic, Kafka, cloud, or data visualization platforms for throughput, latency, query performance, storage lifecycle, high availability, resiliency, cost, and operational supportability.
• Experience designing solutions that move, replicate, or consolidate data across security boundaries, including IL5/IL6 patterns, cross-domain transfer concepts, diode-based transfer patterns, and secure data consolidation.
• Experience developing data visualization standards, reference architectures, reusable dashboard patterns, naming conventions, dashboard governance processes, and reusable UX components that accelerate delivery and improve enterprise consistency.
• Experience with network fundamentals, routing and switching concepts, BGP, MPLS, IP, optical networking, transport protocols, network device configurations, and network management systems.
• Experience with Engineering Review Boards, architecture governance, analysis of alternatives, trade studies, cost-benefit analysis, proposal/ROM support, senior customer demonstrations, and executive-level briefings.
• Relevant certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect, AWS Data Engineer, AWS DevOps Engineer, Elastic Certified Engineer, Confluent/Kafka, Databricks, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, Security+, CISSP, ITIL, or comparable technical certifications.

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Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.