About Navy

The Navy has a long history of engaging in cutting-edge technology development and is unique among the military services in retaining an organic Naval Research and Development Establishment (NRDE), but in recent years the Navy has struggled to gain and maintain momentum in pursuing enterprise-wide technology integration across a diversity of systems. This is especially important in areas where currently disparate systems could realize significant benefits from data sharing; rapid iteration, integration, and deployment; and resilient, modern software architectures.

In December 2018, the Navy created the Digital Integration Support Cell (DISC), which is tasked to accelerate the transformation of the Naval force to the future "should be" state for naval enterprise digital warfighting capabilities realized via non-traditional, cross-enterprise teaming. The DISC is only the second Direct Report Program Manager (DRPM) in the Navy, reporting directly to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition (ASN RDA).

The challenge

How can we help the Navy implement a digital strategy critical to the future technological development of the Navy and our nation’s safety?

In order to succeed in their mandate, the DISC needs to bring together a diverse group of innovators to work as a team against expansive, often ambiguous challenges of modernizing and integrating existing systems in new ways and developing new systems combining the best practices of industry and government. Those efforts together will help define the digital way ahead for warfighting in the Navy. Simply put, the Navy is looking for creative and non-standard ways to improve the way they do software.

As part of this team, the DISC requires expertise in potentially two particular areas of industry best practice to complement existing skills and competencies: (1) software platform architecture and development, including cloud-native and cloud-to-edge strategies; and (2) software application architecture and development, including DevOps, security, and CI/CD practices.

In order to identify and incorporate in this rare and valuable expertise, the DISC would like to partner with the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program to access the best possible talent from industry for addressing these challenges.

The DISC is looking for a software application architect and engineer who has hands-on expertise developing enterprise software for specialist use cases in a range of compute environments ranging from cloud-native to on-premise. This person should be comfortable working as part of a senior level team including platform architects, product and program managers, and domain SMEs, to help shape and define software application strategies in the face of existing systems and uncertain information. This person should be experienced in DevOps, security, CI/CD, and both monolithic and microservice-based architectures.

The candidate should have experience working with and establishing strategy around complex data analytics capabilities and associated APIs and systems across the platform and application development spectrum, with a strong working understanding of end-to-end data collection, processing, and analysis across multiple systems, often in the face of rigid dependencies and technical debt.

The fellow will report directly to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research Development Test and Evaluation (DASN RDT&E), though on a day-to-day basis will assist the DISC Program Manager (PM), Deputy Program Manager (DPM), and overall team in shaping and executing the overall digital strategy.

This role is critical to the future technological development of our Navy, and the nation’s safety. The DISC is very eager to work together with the PIF program in order to address these critical needs.