Watch Officer Lead

⚡This is where real-time decisions drive real-world impact. ⚡

SOSi is seeking a Watch Officer Lead at Camp H.M. Smith to lead mission-focused watch operations and maintain a clear operational picture across complex enterprise networks. The ideal candidate combines senior-level network engineering or network security experience with watch-floor leadership, incident coordination, operational reporting, and the ability to translate technical issues into clear mission impact for technical teams and senior leaders.

The Watch Officer Lead serves as the senior operational lead for the Watch and as the primary operational focal point for the network and enterprise-service situational awareness. The position maintains continuity across Network Operations, Systems Operations, Engineering, Information Assurance, Enterprise Service Desk, DCO/SOC, service owners, and other mission stakeholders without replacing the technical execution responsibilities of those organizations.

💥 At SOSi, we tackle complex technical challenges head-on—because Challenge Accepted isn’t just a motto, it’s how we operate.

Essential Job Duties

• Lead day-to-day Watch operations and provide operational direction, mentoring, and oversight to Watch Officers across shifts.

• Serve as the primary operational focal point for significant network outages, degradations, service disruptions, priority incidents, planned activities, and other mission-impacting events.

• Maintain broad situational awareness across the network, system, enterprise-service, cybersecurity, and infrastructure activities without assuming the execution responsibilities of supporting technical organizations.

• Monitor network health and availability using SolarWinds and other network-management or operational-monitoring platforms, with particular attention to major outages, service degradation, infrastructure dependencies, and mission impact.

• Evaluate technical information received from Network Operations, Systems Operations, Engineering, Information Assurance, Enterprise Service Desk, service owners, and other technical teams; identify information gaps; and obtain what is needed for operational reporting and escalation.

• Coordinate significant incidents across Operations, Network Engineering, Network Operations, Systems Operations, Information Assurance, Enterprise Service Desk, DCO/SOC, TNCC, and other mission partners.

• Ensure significant issues have an identified technical owner, authoritative ticket or JIRA record, current status, mission-impact assessment, next action, and appropriate escalation.

• Track high-priority JIRA, service-management, and engineering tickets while relying on the responsible technical team as the authoritative source for troubleshooting and remediation actions.

• Lead Watch shift turnover and maintain continuity of open incidents, outages, tickets, scheduled activities, reporting requirements, leadership requests, risks, and outstanding actions between shifts.

• Develop concise operational BLUFs explaining what happened, the affected mission or service, operational impact, responsible organization, actions underway, current status, and expected next steps.

• Support TNCC and J6 reporting requirements, including significant-event reporting, C4IR reporting, operational dashboards, SIGACT inputs, Watch roll-ups, leadership briefs, and other recurring or event-driven reporting.

• Support the effective use of MAVEN/MSS as an operational reporting and decision-support environment by helping define reporting requirements, maintain data quality, improve workflows and visualizations, and coordinate with engineering or data personnel to automate reporting where practical.

• Develop and refine Watch SOPs, battle drills, escalation thresholds, reporting standards, turnover procedures, ticket workflows, communication templates, and operational checklists.

• Train Watch Officers to understand the responsibilities of Network Operations, Engineering, Information Assurance, Enterprise Service Desk, DCO/SOC, TNCC, and other supporting organizations so they can rapidly determine ownership and coordinate the appropriate response.

• Identify recurring operational problems, reporting gaps, tool limitations, and process weaknesses and recommend improvements that increase Watch effectiveness and reduce manual workload.

• Support exercises, contingency operations, elevated mission conditions, and other periods requiring expanded Watch coverage or reporting.