Information System Security Officers (ISSO), Senior Security Engineers & Security Engineering Leads (CBP)

The Work

What Success Looks Like

• Findings that get closed stay closed, instead of returning in the next scan under a new number.
• Remediation addresses why the condition existed, not only the instance a scanner happened to catch.
• Recurring finding types get traced back to the build, the process, or the standard that produced them.
• Where something cannot be fixed, the reason and the compensating control are written down and hold up when somebody challenges them.

• Engineers bring you in early because your answer saves them work, not because a gate makes them.
• Requirements arrive in time to change a decision rather than to document one already made.
• You can tell an engineer what will and will not pass, and be right often enough that they stop checking around you.

• Somebody can ask about the state of a system and get an answer that is current rather than an answer from the last assessment.
• What is recorded as implemented matches what is running.
• Risk that leadership needs to know about reaches them while there is still a decision to make.

Where You'd Fit

• Information System Security Officer. You own whether your assigned systems stay authorized and stay honestly described. You decide what counts as an acceptable control implementation, what belongs on a POA&M, and when a change needs a security review before it proceeds.
• Senior Security Engineer. You own how systems get hardened, monitored, and remediated. You decide what the secure configuration is, what tooling the program runs, and which risks get engineered out rather than accepted and tracked.
• Security Engineering Lead. You own the security engineering function as a whole, including the standards other engineers build against. You are accountable when a design meets a threat or an audit finding it did not anticipate.

What You Bring

• You have carried a system through authorization and can say what the hard part actually was.
• You have worked inside RMF or an equivalent federal authorization framework, not only a private-sector control set.
• You have closed a class of findings rather than a list of them, and can describe what you changed to make that stick.
• You have written or reviewed security documentation that somebody else then had to defend in front of a government reviewer.
• You have run continuous monitoring where the data was incomplete and had to be made useful anyway.
• You hold an active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance. Any of these shortens your start date.
• Certifications such as CISSP, CISM, CAP, or Security+ are useful, but they are not a substitute for having done the work.

A note on timing

Employee Benefits