SOFTWARE ENGINEER - GHOSTGEM- 5+ yrs of Experience - TS/SCI w/Poly clearance is required - ID - 521 at Halogen Engineering Group, Inc
Fort George G Meade, MD
$218,000–$225,000
Jul 31, 2026
Fort George G Meade, MD
Sep 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A cleared software engineering role supporting the GHOSTGEM program (including the DINO application) at Fort Meade, MD. The work spans the full development lifecycle — design, implementation, testing, integration, and maintenance — across analytics-heavy, data-intensive, and real-time systems. Candidates must hold an active TS/SCI with a polygraph and bring solid Python, Linux, and containerization experience.
Senior level · 5+ years · Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV · TS/SCI clearance · Full-time
Pay in the description: $218,000–$225,000
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
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
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $158,337 (middle half $126,441–$180,105). 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 Aug 2, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (8)
The posting title says '5+ yrs of Experience' but the formal Qualifications section accepts 7 years of experience with no degree, or a Bachelor's + 5 years, or a Master's + 3 years — the overall years minimum is set to 5 (the lowest qualifying path with a degree, and consistent with the title).
The TS/SCI polygraph must be current (less than seven years old) — this is a hard gate, not merely preferred.
Kubernetes, Helm, RabbitMQ, and Ansible appear under the Requirements section with 'Familiar with' language; they are listed as required because section placement governs, though the softer phrasing suggests the bar may be familiarity rather than deep expertise.
PostgreSQL, Jira, and Confluence are listed under 'Desired Skills' and are therefore preferred.
Languages such as C, C++, Java, Ruby, Perl, and JavaScript appear in the narrative/capabilities sections rather than the Requirements block and are marked preferred accordingly.
Spring and Kafka appear in the capabilities narrative (not the Requirements block) and are marked preferred.
Docker and containerd are listed together as interchangeable containerization options in the Requirements section; containerd is captured as an alternative.
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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