NWS Lead Software Engineer

Basic Qualifications

Requires a Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering, or a related Science, Engineering or Mathematics field. Also requires 5+ years of job-related experience, or a Master's degree plus 3 years of job-related experience. Agile experience preferred.

CLEARANCE REQUIREMENTS:
Department of Defense Secret security clearance obtainable within reasonable time based on requirements. Applicants selected will be subject to a U.S. Government security investigation and must meet eligibility requirements for access to classified information. Due to the nature of work performed within our facilities, U.S. citizenship is required.

Responsibilities for this Position

ROLE AND POSITION OBJECTIVES:

As the NWS Lead Software Engineer for General Dynamics Mission Systems, you will provide technical leadership for a frontend or backend software team supporting a complex, distributed tactical system. You will work across software, systems, hardware, test, and configuration-management disciplines to mature the product, improve development practices, and deliver scalable capabilities.

This role requires an engineer who can lead technical execution while remaining hands-on with architecture, implementation, reviews, planning, and mentoring. The selected candidate will help guide the team’s transition toward memory-safe and type-safe technologies, including Go for new development and JavaScript for existing applications.

Key Responsibilities Serve as the technical lead for a software team, providing technical direction, mentoring, code reviews, and implementation support.

Break down features into well-defined, testable tasks aligned with product and subsystem design boundaries.

Partner with the Product Owner, Scrum Master, program leadership, systems engineering, and SC&I to plan work, manage priorities, and align with coding and development standards.

Support Agile execution, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, technical estimation, retrospectives, and delivery tracking.

Develop, review, and maintain technical artifacts, including test plans, user manuals, administrator manuals, design documentation, and software-development documentation.

Support financial and program-planning activities, including COCOMO estimates, Basis of Estimate (BOE) inputs, and Software Bill of Materials (SW BOM) development.

Conduct and oversee code reviews, ensuring changes meet quality, security, maintainability, testability, and Definition-of-Done expectations.

Assess and improve team maturity, code maturity, codebase size and stabilization trends, development efficiency, and scalability across a distributed environment supporting 3,000+ endpoints.

Help mature CI/CD and Dev Sec Ops  capabilities, including automated unit testing, code-quality analysis, configuration management, and repeatable production builds.

Establish, maintain, or support test beds on SWFPAC.Identify technical risks, dependencies, and architectural concerns early; communicate options, tradeoffs, and recommendations to leadership.

Mentor existing technical leadership and individual contributors, helping build sustainable team capability and knowledge transfer.

Backend Lead Focus Areas The Backend Lead will additionally support:

Backend architecture, database design, and data-model development.

Middleware and Data Distribution Service (DDS) integration, including evaluation of Rust compatibility with RTI DDS.Embedded software and firmware-adjacent development, including FreeRTOS and TCP/IP interfaces, as applicable.

Containerization, virtualization, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment architecture.

Migration and adoption of memory-safe/type-safe technologies, particularly Go and Rust where appropriate.

Build and release management, including Git-based…