Aviation Software Engineer

Flight And Mission Software Development Lead

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,…