Deputy Program Manager​/Chief Engineer

Deputy Program Manager / Chief Engineer

Job :

Job Location s: US-MD-Camp Springs

Category:
Program / Project Management

Type:
Regular Full-Time

Empower AI is AI for government. Empower AI gives federal agency leaders the tools to elevate the potential of their workforce with a direct path for meaningful transformation. Headquartered in Reston, Va., Empower AI leverages three decades of experience solving complex challenges in Health, Defense, and Civilian missions. Our proven Empower AI Platform provides a practical, sustainable path for clients to achieve transformation that is true to who they are, what they do, how they work, with the resources they have.

The result is a government workforce that is exponentially more creative and productive. For more information, visit www.

Empower.ai.

Empower AI is proud to be recognized as a 2024 Military Friendly Employer by Viqtory, the publisher of G.I. Jobs. This designation reflects the company's commitment to hiring and supporting active‑duty and veteran employees.

The Deputy Program Manager and Chief Engineer (DPM-CHENG) provides enterprise‑level operational design and management of hybrid operations for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) information technology (IT) infrastructure. The DPM-CHENG directly supports the Enterprise Infrastructure Division (EID) of the Office of Information Technology (OIT) to coordinate, direct, manage, and oversee the design, development, integration, standards, operation and maintenance of infrastructure operations that support USCIS operations.

• Leads and manages the innovation, design and development of projects that optimize reliability, availability, and performance of production hybrid platforms and services for USCIS IT Infrastructure.
• Engineering Lead for the activities of 75 engineers and technicians supporting USCIS IT Infrastructure, including:
  • Unified Communications
  • Change, Configuration, and Infrastructure Management
  • Automation
  • Hosting
• Provides program technical leadership in:
  • Cloud architecture and platform engineering
  • Security and compliance
  • Automation, Dev Sec Ops , and observability
• Coordinates the activities of the Project Management Office.
• Monitors, and improves Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budgets for critical systems.
• Leads incident response, including coordination during outages, root cause analysis, and blameless postmortems.
• Drives continuous improvement of USCIS IT Infrastructure operations through automation and process improvement.
• Performs strategic and enterprise-level collaboration with all USCIS IT teams and communication with all USCIS stakeholders.
• Acts as the Program Manager in his absence.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• A minimum of ten (10) years of experience in project and program management.
• PMI Project Management Professional (PMP).
• ITIL Foundation.
• A minimum of five (5) years of experience managing Infrastructure IT projects and programs.
• A minimum of three (3) years of experience managing using Dev Ops and Agile.
• Exceptional technical aptitude and effective written and verbal communication skills.

• 10+ years of experience in cloud engineering or cloud operations roles, with deep hands‑on expertise in AWS.
• Proven experience operating production, mission‑critical systems at scale.
• Strong background in automation and IaC (Terraform and/or Cloud Formation).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., AWS Code Pipeline, Git Lab, Jenkins).
• Deep knowledge of cloud security, IAM, encryption, monitoring, and compliance frameworks.
• Experience supporting regulated or government environments (FedRAMP, SOC 2, ISO 27001).
• Multi‑cloud awareness (AWS, OCI, Azure, GCP).
• CCDE – Design Expert.
• CCNP – Enterprise.
• AWS – Certified Solutions Architect – Associate.
• ISC2 – CISSP.
• VW Ware – Cloud Professional.
• SAFe – Architect.
• Certified Scrum Master.
• AZ – Solutions Architect – Expert.

• May require occasional travel between work centers or to client sites.
• Some after‑hours or on‑call support may be necessary.
• On‑site…