Senior Principal Electrical Engineer

The Defense Systems Group at Leidos has an immediate opening for a Senior Principal Electrical Engineer at our St. Petersburg, FL facility. This senior technical leadership role supports the development of advanced, mission-critical defense systems for DoD and national security customers.

In this position, you will serve as a system architect and technical authority, leading the design, integration, and fielding of complex electronic and communications systems. You will provide architectural oversight across RF, digital, hardware, software, and networked subsystems to ensure performance, reliability, security, and environmental requirements are met.

The St. Petersburg facility specializes in the design, modeling and simulation, prototyping, integration, and testing of advanced electronic systems, with emphasis on embedded communications, Software Defined Radios (SDR), and Phased Array Antenna Systems supporting defense and select commercial customers.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Serve as the technical lead and system architect for complex, mission-critical defense systems, overseeing system hardware, software, and network architecture from concept through fielding.
• Lead technical planning, system design, integration, verification and validation (V&V), and deployment activities across the full system lifecycle.
• Conduct system-level trade studies and evaluate architectural alternatives with consideration of cost, schedule, technical risk, supportability, and long-term sustainment.
• Lead requirements development, decomposition, allocation, and traceability to ensure alignment between system-level objectives and subsystem implementation.
• Perform and oversee requirements analysis, functional analysis, timeline analysis, interface definition, and system integration planning.
• Provide technical leadership and oversight to multi-disciplinary engineering teams, ensuring system-level performance, reliability, and compliance objectives are achieved.
• Guide integration, system testing, and quality assurance efforts to ensure readiness for qualification and field deployment.
• Develop and review technical documentation including system architectures, interface control documents (ICDs), verification plans, test procedures, and technical reports.
• Act as a technical advisor to program management and customers, providing insight into emerging technologies, industry trends, and modernization opportunities.
• Support business development activities by contributing to capture strategies, white papers, RFI responses, technical proposals, and Basis of Estimate (BOE) development.

Clearance Requirements:

• U.S. Citizenship required.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Secret Security Clearance.
• Active Secret clearance strongly preferred.
• Ability to obtain and maintain Top Secret clearance preferred.
• Willingness to work in classified laboratory environments and support secure program activities as required.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering or related discipline with 15+ years of relevant experience, or Master’s degree with 13+ years of relevant experience.
• Deep technical expertise in one or more of the following areas:
• RF theory and microwave engineering
• Power supply and power distribution design
• Wireless communications and/or SIGINT technologies
• System and subsystem-level analysis methodologies
• Strong working knowledge of the RF spectrum and modern communications infrastructures, including:
• Signal structures and modulation techniques
• Propagation characteristics
• Data rates and bandwidth considerations
• Multiplexing/demultiplexing methods
• Demonstrated experience leading multi-disciplinary engineering teams and conducting formal technical reviews with customers (SRR, PDR, CDR, TIMs).
• Experience leading hardware integration and full hardware/software system integration efforts.
• Proven ability to evaluate technical approaches considering cost, schedule, risk, and long-term supportability.
• Broad understanding of project lifecycle management principles.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with experience interfacing directly with customers, program management, and senior technical leadership.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Active Secret or Top Secret clearance.
• Experience with advanced communication waveforms, antenna systems, and RF front-end architectures.
• Demonstrated system architecture and cross-disciplinary design leadership (electrical, RF, mechanical, software, computer engineering).
• Experience with Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and architecture frameworks.
• Hands-on experience with:
• RF, digital, and analog hardware design, including schematic capture and PCB layout.
• Environmental qualification requirements (e.g., EMI/EMC, vibration, thermal).
• FPGA development (VHDL design and implementation).
• Simulation and analysis tools such as MATLAB, Python, and LabVIEW.
• Advanced laboratory instrumentation (oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, spectrum analyzers, network analyzers, RF test equipment).
• Experience supporting DoD acquisition programs and classified development environments.

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.