Principal Program Manager, Engineering Operations

Principal Engineer – Software Systems

Principal-level technical leadership for complex, software-intensive systems

The Role

We are looking for a Principal Engineer with deep systems engineering expertise to lead the design and delivery of complex software-intensive systems spanning cloud platforms, distributed systems, AI-enabled products, mission software, and large-scale operational environments.

This is a senior technical leadership role for engineers who thrive in ambiguity, solve problems that span organizational and technical boundaries, and bring clarity to highly complex systems. You will partner with engineering, product, and architecture leaders to define system behavior, establish technical direction, and ensure the software we build remains scalable, resilient, and aligned with customer and mission outcomes.

Success in this role requires balancing engineering rigor with product velocity. You will help teams move faster by simplifying complexity, identifying risks early, and creating architectures that allow independent teams to deliver cohesive systems.

What You'll Do

• Lead the technical design and delivery of complex, cross-domain software systems.
• Define system architecture, integration strategy, and technical direction across multiple engineering teams.
• Translate ambiguous customer, mission, and business problems into scalable technical solutions.
• Lead architecture trade studies and make consequential technical decisions across competing priorities.
• Drive system decomposition, interface definition, dependency management, and integration planning for large distributed systems.
• Partner with Product to validate customer needs and ensure delivered capabilities solve the right problems.
• Identify architectural, integration, operational, and delivery risks early and drive mitigation before they become execution problems.
• Shape technical direction across a product portfolio or strategic technical domain.
• Influence engineering organizations through technical credibility rather than reporting authority.
• Raise engineering quality through better architecture, engineering practices, technical standards, and mentoring of senior technical leaders.
• Drive capabilities from concept through integration, validation, operational readiness, and customer adoption.

AI-Enabled Systems Engineering

AI-assisted development and agentic software engineering are dramatically increasing the rate at which teams can design, implement, and test software. As engineering velocity increases, strong systems engineering becomes even more important to ensure we continue building coherent, scalable, and operationally effective systems.

We are looking for someone who sees AI as an opportunity to evolve how systems engineering is practiced.

• Accelerate system architecture, analysis, and design.
• Identify architectural, integration, and operational risks earlier.
• Scale systems engineering practices to match the speed of AI-enabled software development.

Our goal: increase our ability to design the right systems as quickly as we can build them.

What We're Looking For

Systems Thinking

You naturally reason across systems, interfaces, constraints, dependencies, feedback loops, failure modes, and emergent behavior. You can understand how software, infrastructure, data, operations, and customer workflows interact, and you know how to bring structure to problems that are initially unclear.

Software Architecture

You have significant experience designing and evolving large software systems. You understand distributed systems, APIs, cloud-native architectures, event-driven systems, data flows, scalability, resiliency, observability, security, and operational concerns. You know how to establish clear system boundaries, reduce unnecessary coupling, and create architectures that support both near-term delivery and long-term adaptability.

Technical Leadership

You influence through technical judgment and credibility. You have led major initiatives involving multiple teams and can build alignment across engineering, product, operations, and leadership without relying on organizational authority. You are comfortable making difficult tradeoffs across customer outcomes, technical risk, delivery schedule, cost, maintainability, and strategic flexibility.

You have experience applying AI, automation, and agentic workflows to define and scale engineering standards, templates, playbooks, governance, and SDLC practices, with strong judgment about where human oversight remains necessary.

Learning Agility

You can enter unfamiliar technical or mission domains, identify the governing issues, develop sufficient depth to make sound decisions, and integrate the perspectives of subject-matter experts. You are able to challenge assumptions, resolve technical disagreement, and make cross-domain decisions where no single expert has the complete picture.

Product and Mission Orientation

You understand that successful engineering is not complete when code is written. You remain accountable for integration,…