COTS System Engineer

Why AIS?

When you join AIS, you’re joining a mission-driven team that’s passionate about making a difference. You’ll work on projects that matter, alongside industry-leading experts, in an environment that fosters innovation, driving client success, and empowering our team to make a lasting impact. As an employee-owned company, we value collaboration, inclusivity, continuous growth, and shared success.

• Employee Ownership: Your contributions directly impact the company’s success, and you share in its achievements.

• Continuous Learning: Access to resources, training, and mentorship to support your professional growth.

• Inclusive Culture: A workplace where diversity is celebrated, and everyone’s voice is valued.

• Mission-Driven Work: Engage in projects that make a meaningful difference for our clients and communities.

 

What are we looking for?

At AIS, we're looking for more than just skills - we're looking for driven individuals who are passionate about making a difference, eager to grow, and aligned with our core principles.

 

Working@AIS
At AIS, we are dedicated to providing our employees with diverse opportunities to grow their careers while supporting a variety of impactful projects. For this position, we are seeking a talented individual to join AIS as a Lead Infrastructure Engineer.

• Core Knowledge & Skills: Aligns infrastructure strategy to business goals, leads large projects, applies compliance frameworks, designs high availability/disaster recovery and performance optimization patterns, and shapes deployment pipeline design.

• Work & Complexity: Directs cross-team programs, performs advanced tuning, implements high availability/failover architectures, leads audits, plans growth, and manages budgets.

• Quality & Independence: Delivers high-quality outcomes, sets team standards, introduces innovative solutions, and makes high-impact decisions.

• Teamwork & Communication: Leads the engineering team, develops talent, resolves conflicts, and communicates effectively with senior leadership and stakeholders.

• Consulting & Engagement: Provides high-level consulting to leadership, builds roadmaps, negotiates vendor contracts, and sponsors innovation initiatives.

As your initial project assignment, you will support the unique needs of our client as a COTS System Engineer.

The Senior System Administrator will support the implementation of a COTS physical access system. The Senior Systems Administrator will partner with the government Product Manager in providing technical direction and strategic solutions, O&M support, working with the vendor, and adhere to agile methodology and kanban and scrum ceremonies. Key skills needed for the position include experiences with the technology and business tools listed below and strong verbal and written skills and demonstrates self-organizing and initiative competencies.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide development and O&M support for a production system during core working hours and non-core working hours as needed to meet mission needs.
• Understand and assist with the installation, configuration, and validation of the Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software product in test and production environments.
• Coordinate integration activities with cross‑functional teams, including networking, server/VM administrators, identity and access management, and application owners.
• Evaluate system requirements, dependencies, and integration points to ensure compatibility and operational readiness.
• Understand, communicate, support and coordinate support activities including;
• Networking - such as ports, protocols, firewalls, and load balancers as required for system connectivity.
• Compute - such as server and virtual machine provisioning, configuration, and performance tuning.
• Database - collaborate with database teams to configure, query, and troubleshoot Microsoft SQL Server instances.
• Identity and Access – authentication and authorization mechanisms including single sign on and possess knowledge of Microsoft Entra ID.
• Integration - work with APIs and integration frameworks, including Microsoft Graph, to support data exchange and system interoperability.
• Assist in preparing documentation required for system accreditation, compliance, and security assessments.
• Develop and maintain technical documentation, including installation guides, configuration baselines, and operational procedures.
• Provide hands‑on troubleshooting and issue resolution throughout testing and deployment phases.
• Communicate project status, risks, and technical considerations clearly to stakeholders and leadership.  

Required for this opportunity

• Exceptional analytical and conceptual thinking skills.
• Excellent planning, organizational, and time management skills.
• Self-motivated with strong initiative, work independently, and “roll up their sleeves” to drive tasks to completion.
• Experience working with the Certipath TrustVistor or similar product.
• Experience with Agile and Scrum and Kanban frameworks/methodologies.
• Experience with Atlassian tools to include Jira and Confluence.

Nice to Have Skills

• Exceptional analytical and conceptual thinking skills.
• Excellent planning, organizational, and time management skills.
• Self-motivated with strong initiative, work independently, and “roll up their sleeves” to drive tasks to completion.
• Experience working with the Certipath TrustVistor or similar product.
• Experience with Agile and Scrum and Kanban frameworks/methodologies.
• Experience with Atlassian tools to include Jira and Confluence.

At AIS, we are committed to offering competitive and fair compensation that reflects the skills, experience, and contributions of each team member. The targeted base salary range for this role is $121,000-$182,000 per year. Please note that this range is provided as a guideline and the final offer will be based on several factors, including but not limited to, skillset and competencies, level of experience, education, certifications, and location. We value transparency in our hiring process and are happy to discuss how your unique qualifications align with our compensation structure during the interview process.

Applied Information Sciences does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, religion, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other basis. Employment decisions are based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs.