Aviation Software Engineer

Leidos is dedicated to making the world a safer place. This starts with helping our customers in the Defense Industry achieve their critical missions. Our dedicated Defense Sector employees are solving critical challenges across the globe. At Leidos, we deliver innovative solutions through the efforts of our diverse and talented people who are dedicated to our customers’ success.  We empower our teams, contribute to our communities, and operate sustainably. Everything we do is built on a commitment to do the right thing for our customers, our people, and our community. Our Mission, Vision, and Values guide the way we do business. With offices across the United States engaging in the defense, space, cyber and commercial fields, Leidos provides responsive, cost-effective engineering, scientific and IT solutions. Leidos is well known for our people-oriented culture, positive work environment, technical excellence, and resilient business ethics. 

Within the Defense Sector, the Software Engineering Applications Department at Leidos currently has an opening for a talented Flight and Mission Software Development Lead to work onsite in our Huntsville, AL office. This is an exciting and unusual opportunity to use your knowledge, skills, experience, and insight to launch the next phase of your career at Leidos by leading a talented software team through Agile development practices while actively contributing to the codebase. You'll produce solutions for the nation's leading advanced defense technologies such as manned aircraft software, tactical strike systems, sensors, computer vision, uncrewed air systems (UAS), counter UAS, mission planning, command/control/communications (C3), platform autonomy, network collaborative autonomy, aerial refueling, and flight management systems.

Primary Responsibilities

• Scrum Master & Agile Leadership: As the Scrum Master for your software team, you will facilitate sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. You'll manage backlog grooming sessions, ensure adherence to Agile principles, remove impediments, and foster continuous improvement in team processes.

• IPT Leadership & Strategic Decision-Making: Lead a Software Integrated Product Team (IPT) with authority to make high-level technical and programmatic decisions. You'll guide development strategies, establish architectural directions, resolve technical conflicts, and ensure cohesive integrated solutions on complex systems. Your leadership will span strategic planning, resource allocation, risk management, and defining the technical roadmap.

• Active Software Development: This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will actively contribute to the codebase, conducting design reviews, writing production code, performing code reviews, troubleshooting complex technical issues, and setting the standard for code quality and engineering excellence across the technology stack.

• Cross-Functional Coordination: Serve as the primary liaison coordinating between hardware engineers, test engineers, systems engineers, program management, and other engineering disciplines. You'll facilitate integration activities, resolve interface issues, align schedules across teams, and ensure seamless communication between technical stakeholders and leadership.

• Direct communication with customers, end users, internal stakeholders, hardware teams, test organizations, management, and team members will be required on a frequent basis to ensure alignment across all engineering disciplines.

Basic Qualifications

• Candidate must possess at least a bachelor’s degree in software engineering, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent technical degree.

• Candidate should have 8+ years of relevant technical experience with demonstrated hands-on software development.

• Candidate should have 3+ years of relevant experience leading teams, managing resources for software development, and serving in Scrum Master or similar Agile facilitation roles.

• Strong hands-on development experience in C, C++, Rust, C#, or Java is required. Candidates must articulate strong competency in active development in at least one of these programming languages, object-oriented design principles, and troubleshooting. You must be able to contribute production-quality code regularly.

• Excellent communication (verbal and written) and team leadership skills with proven ability to coordinate across multiple engineering disciplines including hardware, test, systems, and management.

• Candidate must demonstrate their ability to work independently, collaborate closely with team members, discern efficient roles and tasks for their team members, think critically, act confidently and judiciously, exercise impeccable judgement, consistently make rational decisions, and impart a productive sense of urgency to others.

• Experience working on one or more final products that went beyond prototypes, demonstrations, test beds, or internal/lab use only. The candidate's prior experience must exist on software products, integrated systems, or simulations that were released and fielded as either a product itself, used operationally on an integrated system, or released and used independently by individuals other than those who developed it.

• Proficient with efficient use of peer reviews and evaluations of software development plans, specifications, requirements management, architectures, designs, source code, unit tests, verification plans and procedures. 

• Fundamental and working knowledge of software configuration management, code repositories and build system components, such as DevSecOps, CI/CD pipelines, CMake, GitLab, Docker, and virtualization tools (e.g., VMWare, QEMU, VirtualBox, Hyper-V).

• Fundamental and working knowledge of general-purpose operating systems (Linux, UNIX, and/or Windows) and practical knowledge of their respective development tools/IDEs, scripts, debuggers, and administrative features.

• Understanding the software development life cycle, its phases, life cycle models, metrics or performance indicators, and techniques for rapid development while ensuring high-quality solutions and on-time results.

• Basic understanding of software engineering process and the appropriateness of its use, application, and proper methods of tailoring.

• Basic understanding of systems engineering principles and practices relevant to software, and ability to interface effectively with systems engineers and other technical disciplines.

• Have strong analytical and process improvement skills along with a personal drive for details and quality workmanship. 

• Possess an aptitude for the technical skills required for software test and software quality engineering concepts. 

• Demonstrate familiarity with Microsoft Office (Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). 

• Have good communication skills.

• Must be a resident of North Alabama or willing to relocate to the Huntsville-North Alabama area.

Preferred Qualifications

• Agile/Scrum Expertise: Formal training or certification as a Scrum Master (CSM, PSM) or SAFe Product Owner.  Demonstrated experience facilitating retrospectives, sprint reviews, backlog grooming, and driving continuous process improvement. Experience with Agile tools such as Atlassian Jira, or similar platforms.

• Cross-Discipline Collaboration: Proven track record coordinating software development with hardware engineering teams, test organizations, systems engineering, program management, and leadership stakeholders on integrated defense systems.

• Software Development: Experience with planning, specification, design, development, integration, installation/deployment, and maintenance of software for airborne systems, mission planning systems, missile/weapon platforms, uncrewed or autonomous systems, and/or ground control/support systems.

• User Experience Programming Languages: Basic knowledge in one or more programming languages used in applications and front-end software, such as Python, .NET/C#, Java, C++, Qt, and XML.

• Problem-Solving: Ability to comprehend changes, characterize impact and assess risk to plans or existing solutions, estimate their level of effort and resources, describe (written and verbal) courses of action (COA) or decision analysis, and facilitate team consensus across multiple engineering disciplines.

• Collaboration: Work responsibly, reliably and independently in a fast-paced, open, collaborative cross-functional environment without direct oversight. Experience bridging communication gaps between software, hardware, test, and management teams.

• Transparency: Elicit, accept, and provide constructive informal feedback amongst other team members to uphold technical excellence and quality workmanship.

Security Clearance Qualifications:

• Must be a U.S. Citizen with the ability to obtain and maintain a Secret Security Clearance.

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 — and moving faster than anyone else dares.

Original Posting:

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.