Network Engineers, Senior Engineers & Architects (CBP)

About this role

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 Salary Range: [Pending] Signing Bonus: $10,000 for candidates with an active CBP BI. Payable after 90 days; standard terms apply. Travel: As needed 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. Changes you make hold up under continuous operational load, not just in the maintenance window. Objective 2: Modernize the network without taking the mission offline Refresh and redesign work lands inside approved windows and does not run past them. Designs account for the sites that are hardest to reach and hardest to take down, not only the convenient ones. Capacity and transport decisions get made before a site outgrows them, rather than after users start complaining. Rollback paths exist and have been tested before a cutover begins, not drafted during one. Objective 3: Close the gap between how the network is documented and how it behaves Someone who was not present for a change can understand what was done and why. Diagrams and configuration records match what is actually deployed. Where a standard exists, it is written down. Where one does not, that gap is visible rather than tribal knowledge. Troubleshooting knowledge ends up somewhere searchable rather than staying in your head. Where You'd Fit We are hiring across several levels. You do not need to pick one before applying. Tell us where you think you land and we will talk about it.   Network Specialist. You execute changes and work incidents inside established standards. You know which problems are yours to solve and which need to go up, and you escalate before a small issue becomes an outage. Network Engineer. You own a segment, a site group, or a system. You make routine design calls yourself and bring the consequential ones to review. Senior Network Engineer. You take the problems that arrive without a clear answer. Other engineers check their approach with you before they commit to it, and you are usually the one who figures out why the intermittent fault is not intermittent. Senior Network Architect. You set the design that others build against, and you are accountable when that design meets an operational reality it did not anticipate. Lead Network Architect. You own whether the environment holds together as a whole, including the parts you did not design and the decisions you inherited. What You Bring Preferred Experience   You have kept a distributed network running where downtime had consequences beyond user frustration. You have modernized live infrastructure under change control, not only built new environments. You have worked at remote or austere sites and can describe what you did differently because of it. You have operated in mixed-vendor environments and are not dependent on one vendor's tooling. You hold an active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance. Any of these shortens your start date. You can work inside federal change management and accreditation without treating it as an obstacle. Certifications such as CCNP, CCIE, or JNCIP are useful but not a substitute for having done the work. A note on timing We are staffing this program now. 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. We would like to talk this week.   If you do not, we can begin processing a CBP BI for you. That takes months rather than weeks, so applying now means joining a pipeline rather than starting immediately. We would rather tell you that up front than have you find out after you apply. Employee Benefits Agile's be