Flight Software Architect

Leidos is dedicated to making the world a safer place. This starts with helping our customers in the Defense Industry achieve their critical missions. Our dedicated Defense Group employees are solving critical challenges across the globe. At Leidos, we deliver innovative solutions through the efforts of our diverse and talented people who are dedicated to our customers’ success.  We empower our teams, contribute to our communities, and operate sustainably.

Everything we do is built on a commitment to do the right thing for our customers, our people, and our community. Our Mission, Vision, and Values guide the way we do business. With offices across the United States engaging in the defense, space, cyber and commercial fields, Leidos provides responsive, cost-effective engineering, scientific and IT solutions. Leidos is well known for our people-oriented culture, positive work environment, technical excellence, and resilient business ethics.

Within the Defense Sector, the Airborne Systems Business Area at Leidos currently has an opening for a talented Senior Embedded Flight Software Architect to work in our Huntsville office. This is an exciting opportunity to use your knowledge, experience, and design expertise to envision, formulate and design the capabilities of embedded software for flight systems.

This position primarily focuses on the system and software design of robust, innovative, modular software for real-time embedded airborne systems. The position’s secondary focus is the design of software to support fielding, operations, support, and maintenance of embedded software products. The position’s duties include architecture work on different software products across the system: embedded flight software, analysis tools/simulations, mission planning software, and components of mission-critical systems.

This position will touch a variety of embedded computing technologies, hardware, interfaces, and development/debugging tools, such as device drivers, flash memory, bootloaders, board support packages, printed circuit boards (PCBs), microcontrollers, JTAG interfaces, real-time operating systems (RTOS), single-board computers, systems-on-chip (SoCs), and varying levels of communications protocols. The position will also encompass technical advisement to program teams, capture teams, customers/stakeholders, talent acquisition specialists, and senior leaders of Leidos business organizations.

Evaluation of candidates for this position will have a technical emphasis with focus on architectural competency demonstrated through structured interviews, design exercises and discussions, and validity of concepts. Candidates should be prepared to discuss their prior experience with system and software design, architectural decision-making, technical contributions and leadership, demonstrated versatility, increasing technical responsibility, and career growth.

Primary Responsibilities Design embedded software structures, interfaces, and behaviors for airborne systems that are modular, composable, open, testable, reusable, scalable, resilient to evolving requirements, and conform ant to relevant standards.

Provide hands-on technical leadership throughout software development, including implementation in embedded programming languages such as C, C++, or Rust; guiding firmware development; supporting initial integration and testing on target embedded computing platforms; and directly contributing when appropriate.

Develop and evaluate conceptual flight software architectures for primary and supporting systems, considering new development, reuse of existing software assets, hybrid approaches, and the technical, cost, schedule, and risk tradeoffs among alternative solutions.

Identify relevant standards,…