Principal Information Security Engineer
Clarity Innovations · Fort Meade, MD
$117,000–$292,000from the description
Jul 21, 2026
Fort Meade, MD
Jul 23, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
An information systems security engineer role embedded within a development team building a new infrastructure-as-code environment for national security work. Day-to-day responsibilities center on managing the Risk Management Framework process end-to-end — producing and maintaining ATO package artifacts, translating security controls into technical requirements, and integrating security tooling into Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines. Suits an experienced ISSE comfortable operating in classified cloud environments.
Senior level · 5+ years · TS/SCI clearance · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $132,021 (middle half $99,961–$167,095). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (11)
The role title is 'Information Systems Security Engineer' (ISSE), sitting squarely in security analysis/engineering (RMF, ATO packages, control assessments, vulnerability analysis). The alt SOC 15-1244 is noted because the qualifications also call for 5-8 years as a network/system administrator or system engineer, reflecting an infrastructure operations background.
Location is not stated in the posting. The role supports classified/government programs and likely requires on-site work given the TS/SCI + SAP clearance requirement, but no specific city or state is mentioned.
The clearance requirement is active TS/SCI with SAP eligibility — a hard gate explicitly stated in the qualifications.
The 5-8 year experience range is stated at the role level (network/system administrator, system engineer, or ISSE); the overall years minimum is set to 5 (the lower bound). The 2-year specialized experience in at least one domain (Cloud, CI/CD, DevSecOps, IaC, TS/SAP, or cyber operations) is a separate sub-requirement captured on the RMF skill.
Cloud platform experience (AWS or Azure) is listed as a required specialization area; AWS is the primary skill with Azure as an alternative, reflecting the posting's stated preference for Azure or AWS.
ACAS, Nessus, and SonarQube are listed as required scanner experience in the qualifications section.
All certification preferences (CCSP, Azure Security Engineer Associate, AWS Certified Security Specialist, CISSP-ISSAP, CISSP-ISSEP, GDSA, FITSP-D, CSSLP, CKA, Certified Container Security Expert) appear under 'Preferred Qualifications' and are marked accordingly.
eMASS and Xacta (along with SNOW and LATTE ART) appear under Preferred Qualifications; eMASS is the primary skill with Xacta as an alternative. SNOW and LATTE ART are government-specific workflow tools with very limited public documentation and are omitted as they are not widely canonical named technologies.
The salary range ($117,000–$292,000/year) is unusually wide, likely reflecting variation across seniority levels, clearance levels, or geographic locations within the company's hiring band.
A current DoDM 8570 IAT Level II/III or DoD 8140.01 intermediate certification under the 'Security Architect' role is a hard gate but represents a certification category rather than a single named tool; it is not emitted as a discrete skill.
Requires a TS/SCI clearance — the cleared population is a small fraction of this occupation, so the real candidate pool is materially smaller than the estimate below, which does not model clearance.
Read the full posting
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