Incident Response Engineer

The Incident Response Engineer serves as a hands-on technical responder for IT incidents — rapidly triaging telemetry, implementing targeted remediations/workarounds, and validating service restoration for federal mission critical IT systems and services. The engineer collaborates with Incident Managers/Coordinators, Problem and Change teams; contributes to runbook/knowledge improvements and automation ideas that reduce time to resolve and improve resilience.

This position uses monitoring data and incident records to distinguish false positives from genuine service degradations, validate corrective actions, and continuously refine runbooks, alerts, and automation. Engineers in this role are key contributors to a stable and resilient IT environment, ensuring quick, consistent responses to incidents across infrastructure, application, and network layers.

Key Responsibilities

• Real‑Time Triage & Remediation: Review logs/metrics/alerts; determine scope/impact/fault domain; execute diagnostics; implement workarounds (service restarts/config adjustments); validate restoration.
• Tooling & Records: Use ITSM/alerting/monitoring tools to acknowledge events, track work, coordinate on‑call responders, and maintain accurate incident records/evidence packs.
• Collaboration & Escalation: Escalate complex issues to Senior Engineers; support RCA and corrective/preventive actions; participate in major incident bridges with disciplined status updates.
• Runbook & Knowledge Contributions: Improve operational runbooks, knowledge articles, and thresholds based on lessons learned; propose automation for repetitive responses.
• Shift Handoffs & Communication: Maintain clear handoffs and stakeholder updates on status, risk, and next steps.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business Administration, or related field, or equivalent relevant work experience.

• Minimum of 4 years of experience in incident management, IT operations, site reliability engineering, or a related IT role with direct responsibility for hands‑on diagnosis and remediation.

• Strong understanding of ITIL‑aligned incident management principles and best practices, including prioritization, escalation, and lifecycle management of incidents.

• Proficiency with incident management and monitoring tools (such as IT service management platforms, alerting systems, and performance dashboards) used to manage tickets, coordinate responders, and track resolution.

• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple concurrent incidents, analyze complex technical issues under time pressure, and communicate clearly with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

• Active or obtainable SECRET clearance and U.S. citizenship, with the ability to comply with all applicable federal security and suitability requirements.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with modern monitoring, SIEM, or observability toolchains to support incident detection and response in large enterprise or federal IT environments.

• ITIL Foundation or similar incident management / IT service management certification combined with practical operations experience.

• Background in leveraging automation or scripting to standardize common response actions and reduce manual effort for recurring incident types.

• Familiarity with federal or defense‑focused IT environments, including associated compliance expectations and change control processes.