Chief Engineer, Developer

Description

Wanted:
The platform engineer who turns a collection of tools into a cohesive platform–and makes it look inevitable.

Leidos is building Mission

OS: the unified platform that will power how thousands of engineers build, deploy, and operate mission-critical software across the enterprise.

This isn’t about stitching together a few CI/CD pipelines. This is about designing the infrastructure, runtimes, developer tooling, and self-service capabilities that become the foundation for every software team s is about creating golden paths that make it easy to do the right thing—and nearly impossible to do the wrong thing.

This role exists because platforms don’t design themselves. Tools proliferate. Architectures drift. Teams optimize locally and integrate painfully. And without a principal-level engineer focused on the big picture, you end up with a pile of capabilities instead of a platform.

You’ll be the engineer who fixes that—by defining what Mission

OS needs to be, then working relentlessly to make it real.

Mission

OS isn’t just another platform initiative. It’s the foundation for how Leidos builds software for the next decade. This role is about ensuring we don’t just accumulate tools—we build a platform that makes engineering teams faster, safer, and more effective. You’ll shape technical decisions that affect thousands of developers and define what "modern software delivery" means at Leidos.

• Define the platform architecture. Work with the Mission
  
  OS Product Owner to design the long-term vision for how infrastructure, runtimes, CI/CD, developer tooling, and self-service portals fit together into a cohesive developer platform.
• Drive technical direction. Lead build vs. buy evaluations, architectural trade‑off decisions, and integration design across multiple platform capabilities (pSDO, LSRE, Quiver, and future tools). You’re the deep‑dive technical voice that informs product decisions.
• Partner with engineering teams. Work closely with engineering managers building individual Mission
  
  OS capabilities to ensure implementation aligns with the broader platform vision. Talk shop. Review designs. Solve integration challenges.
• Move fast on emerging needs. Program teams need platform capabilities now. You balance long‑term architectural consistency with the urgency of delivering value quickly. You know when to build for the future and when to ship something that works today.
• Represent platform needs externally. Engage with corporate IT (CIOS), security (CIS), and compliance teams to ensure platform decisions align with enterprise standards, security requirements, and regulatory constraints.
• Cover security and compliance. Ensure Mission
  
  OS platform decisions account for security, compliance, and operational risk. You speak confidently with security teams about how the platform addresses their concerns.
• Enable self-service ign infrastructure- and policy‑as‑code patterns, golden‑path templates, and developer portal experiences that let teams provision environments, deploy applications, and access services without waiting for tickets.

• An architect who codes. You think clearly about large‑scale system architecture, but you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty. You can whiteboard a vision, then open a terminal and prove it works.
• A systems thinker. You see how CI/CD, infrastructure, security, observability, and developer experience interact. You design for the whole system, not just individual components.
• Pragmatic and delivery‑focused. You balance "perfect" with "good enough to ship." You know when to invest in long‑term architecture and when to solve the immediate problem and iterate later.
• A technical peer to engineering managers. You can engage deeply with teams building platform capabilities, talk shop about implementation details, and earn respect through technical credibility.
• Comfortable operating at multiple altitudes. You can zoom out to discuss long‑term platform strategy with executives, then zoom in to debug a Kubernetes manifest with an engineer. You move fluidly between vision and execution.
• Experienced with security and compliance. You understand what CIOS…