Senior Principal Software Engineer, Ground System Software Architect

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Ground System Software Architect

Position Title:

Sr. Principal Software Engineer, Ground System Software Architect

Work Location:

Albuquerque, NM (preferred) or Herndon, VA

Clearance Requirement:
Active Top-Secret security clearance and the ability to maintain the clearance required. U.S. citizenship is required to obtain a clearance.

Employment Type:

Full-time

About Us:

Black Ve, Inc. is a mission-first, dynamic, and innovative national security-focused company focused on emerging space and advanced technologies dedicated to pushing the boundaries of engineering excellence in support of our government customers.

Job Description:

We're looking for a Ground Software Systems Architect to lead the design, integration, and delivery of the ground software system behind our commercial space domain awareness (SDA) platform. Success in this role depends as much on architecture, interface definition, and vendor coordination as it does on writing code.

The ideal candidate sits at the intersection of systems engineering and software engineering: someone who can translate mission needs into concrete requirements, define and validate interfaces between components, evaluate and integrate commercial and open-source tooling, and stay hands-on enough to guide implementation. You'll be a central technical voice, working across internal software, engineering, and program teams, external vendors, and customers.

• Own the end-to-end architecture of the ground software system.
• Selection, integration, and orchestration of third-party space domain awareness analytics tools into a cohesive, maintainable platform.
• Generate, decompose, and manage system and software requirements, tracing them from mission objectives through to implementation and verification.
• Define, document, and validate interfaces (ICDs) between internal components, third-party tools, and external systems.
• Lead and coordinate development activities, setting technical direction and reviewing implementation against the architecture.
• Serve as a primary technical point of contact for external stakeholders, vendors, partners, and customers; communicating design decisions, tradeoffs, and status clearly.
• Design and deploy cloud infrastructure on AWS, with an emphasis on secure, compliant environments.
• Identify and mitigate technical risk across the system lifecycle, from concept through operations.

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated experience architecting complex software systems, particularly those built from integrated third-party or COTS tools.
• Strong systems engineering fundamentals: requirements generation and management, interface definition, and verification.
• Software engineering proficiency is sufficient to guide implementation, evaluate technical work hands-on, and contribute to development of APIs and Python scripts.
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating workloads on AWS.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with a track record of engaging directly with external partners and customers.

• Experience with AWS Gov Cloud and deploying in regulated or security-sensitive environments.
• Background in space domain awareness, satellite ground systems, and the broader space/aerospace domain.
• Familiarity with ground segment software (e.g., mission planning, tasking, tracking, telemetry, cataloging, or data processing pipelines).
• Experience integrating commercial SDA data sources or sensor networks.

• This position is based in Albuquerque, NM, with occasional travel to other company locations or partner facilities as needed.