Operations Watch Engineer

Position Overview

The Operations Watch Engineer serves as a critical operational lead within a 24/7 watch environment, responsible for maintaining continuous awareness of mission-critical systems and ensuring the timely coordination, triage, and resolution of IT incidents and service disruptions. This role functions as the central point of operational visibility during routine operations and high-tempo events, helping restore services quickly, minimize business impact, and maintain alignment with Task Order objectives. The engineer partners across technical support teams, stakeholders, and leadership to drive disciplined incident management, clear situational reporting, effective escalation, and continuous improvement of watch floor operations and IT service management processes.

Key Responsibilities

• Monitor multiple systems, applications, dashboards, and real-time operational data feeds to maintain continuous situational awareness across mission-critical environments.
• Serve as the initial point of contact for operational incidents and service disruptions, assessing impact and urgency, initiating triage actions, and escalating issues in accordance with established standard operating procedures.
• Coordinate cross-functional response efforts during incidents, outages, and degraded system conditions to accelerate restoration of service and maintain operational continuity.
• Draft and disseminate accurate, timely, and concise situational reports, including spot reports, incident updates, shift summaries, and other operational communications for stakeholders and leadership.
• Maintain a complete and chronological watch log of significant events, actions taken, escalations, and outcomes to support accountability and seamless shift turnover.
• Act as the communication hub during operational events, ensuring that field teams, technical teams, management, and senior leaders receive clear and actionable status updates.
• Analyze incomplete or rapidly evolving operational information, connect disparate data points, and make sound recommendations under pressure.
• Identify opportunities to improve monitoring, escalation workflows, reporting practices, and ITSM processes to enhance operational responsiveness and service reliability.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field; four additional years of relevant experience may be substituted in lieu of a degree.
• 5+ years of relevant experience in IT operations, incident management, service operations, network operations, watch floor operations, or a similar mission-critical support environment.
• Demonstrated experience coordinating incident response activities and driving issue resolution in a fast-paced operational setting.
• Proven ability to assess operational issues quickly, determine severity and business impact, and take appropriate action with limited supervision.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to prepare concise operational reports and brief stakeholders and senior leadership effectively.
• Experience using enterprise monitoring, observability, or watch floor tools such as Kibana, Nagios, Grafana, or similar platforms.
• Strong analytical, organizational, and decision-making skills, with the ability to remain composed and effective in high-pressure situations.
• Ability to work a rotating 12-hour shift schedule in a 24/7 support environment, including nights, weekends, and holidays as required.
• Ability to obtain and maintain any required background investigation associated with the client environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with ITIL-aligned incident management, major incident response, and service operations best practices.
• Experience supporting federal, defense, or other highly regulated operational environments.
• Familiarity with IT service management platforms and ticketing systems used to manage incidents, requests, and operational workflows.
• Experience briefing leadership during service disruptions, outages, or other time-sensitive operational events.

Compensation Ranges

Compensation ranges for ASM Research positions vary depending on multiple factors; including but not limited to, location, skill set, level of education, certifications, client requirements, contract-specific affordability, government clearance and investigation level, and years of experience. The compensation displayed for this role is a general guideline based on these factors and is unique to each role. Monetary compensation is one component of ASM's overall compensation and benefits package for employees.

EEO Requirements

It is the policy of ASM that an individual's race, color, religion, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation or national origin are not and will not be considered in any personnel or management decisions. We affirm our commitment to these fundamental policies.

All recruiting, hiring, training, and promoting for all job classifications is done without regard to race, color, religion, sex, disability, or age. All decisions on employment are made to abide by the principle of equal employment.

Physical Requirements

The physical requirements described in "Knowledge, Skills and Abilities" above are representative of those which must be met by an employee to successfully perform the primary functions of this job. (For example, "light office duties' or "lifting up to 50 pounds" or "some travel" required.) Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with qualifying disabilities, who are otherwise qualified, to perform the primary functions.

Disclaimer

The preceding job description has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job.