Chief Engineer​/Principal Software Engineer Aurora,

Job Title:

Chief Engineer/Principal Software Engineer

Job Category:
Engineering

Time Type:
Full time

Minimum Clearance Required to Start: TS/SCI

Employee Type:
Regular

Percentage of

Travel Required:

Up to 25%

Type of Travel:
Continental US

Anticipated Posting End: 10/30/2026

We are seeking a talented and motivated Chief Engineer to lead the "how" and "when" of technical execution for a large-scale government program. Partnering closely with our Chief Architect - who defines the long-term technical vision and system design - you will focus on delivery management, operational rigor, engineering standards, and team enablement. Leading a distributed team of 45+ engineers, you will provide end-to-end technical execution oversight for a modern data lake system supporting national critical operations.

In this role, you will translate architectural blueprints and complex requirements into scalable, disciplined, and predictable delivery—cultivating strong customer relationships to deeply understand mission needs and successfully realize them through execution.

• Modern Data Lake Platform:
  Drive the execution and delivery of a high-throughput, scalable data lake solution utilizing a modern technology stack hosted on AWS.
• Massive Scale & Integration:
  Oversee the operational execution for a large volume of diverse data inputs, a broad user base, and an even larger downstream consumer community.
• External Interfaces:
  Oversee the development, integration, and ongoing maintenance of various APIs supporting external data users and producers.

• Execution & Delivery Strategy:
  Own the implementation plans, technical roadmaps and delivery schedules, translating the Chief Architect's high-level designs into actionable, high-quality development sprints and releases.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship:
  Lead, mentor, and upskill a team of engineers across the full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) within classified government environments.
• Engineering Standards & Processes:
  Establish robust coding standards, code review practices, CI/CD pipelines, and Dev Ops workflows to ensure consistent, repeatable software delivery across all squads.
• API & Integration Oversight:
  Ensure high availability, performance, and security for critical data ingestion pipelines and external producer/consumer APIs through rigorous engineering management.
• Quality & Technical Debt Management:
  Drive Continuous Delivery, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code, and container orchestration while balancing feature delivery with technical debt reduction.
• Stakeholder Engagement:
  Serve as a primary technical interface to leadership, government customers, and subcontractor teams, leading Technical Exchange Meetings (TEMs) and aligning execution with mission goals.
• Risk & Resource Management:
  Proactively identify and mitigate technical, operational, and cross-team dependency risks while championing engineering best practices.

• Clearance:
  Active TS/SCI Security Clearance.
• Education & Experience:
  
  Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, with 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Leadership Track Record:
  Proven experience as a Chief Engineer or senior technical delivery leader guiding large-scale teams (35+ personnel) through full SDLC in classified environments (
  
  Note:
  
  architectural vision is covered by our Chief Architect, so this role centers on execution, delivery, and team enablement).
• Technical Execution & Operations:
  Extensive experience managing large-scale system deployments on cloud platforms (AWS), data engineering, distributed system principles, and Kubernetes-based deployments.
• Methodologies:
  Proven experience leading Agile initiatives, distributed engineering teams, code quality assessments, and testing validation across multi-site work forces.
• Additional
  
  Skills:
  
  Strong cross-functional communication, interpersonal collaboration, and the ability to manage multiple technical delivery tasks under tight deadlines.

• Clearance:
  Active TS/SCI with adjudicated Polygraph.
• Business Acumen:
  Ability to align engineering execution with programmatic…