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 conformant 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, practices, processes, and deliverables. Guide software teams to develop in accordance with them and continually perform hands-on reviews and mentoring.
• Collaborate closely with software developers, program teams, solution architects, and corporate technical leadership. Maintain accountability for the technical integrity of assigned architectures and designs, proactively seeking independent reviews, challenging assumptions, and incorporating constructive technical feedback.
• Collaborate with and advise Software IPT Leads, Technical Leads, and Test Leads on approaches for software project execution, estimation, development, verification, validation, and presentations to customers/stakeholders.
• Collaborate closely with systems engineers to model and maintain software architectures using model-based systems engineering (MBSE) techniques, applicable modeling standards, frameworks, methodologies, and reference architectures.
• Assist electrical designers with the formulation of solutions, trade studies, and selection of electrical systems and embedded computing hardware platforms.
• Support working groups and consortia with software architecture expertise, requests for comments (RFCs), and contributions.
• Assist software development teams by participating in Agile planning, writing epics and high-level stories, task estimation, execution, and progress reporting.
• Participate in requirements and design reviews to maintain consistency and quality of the architecture and overall solution, to include regular sharing of relevant architectural knowledge with the team.
• Contribute solutions, software architectures, and evidence-based estimates to proposals and advise capture teams with software subject-matter expertise.
• Communicate directly and regularly with customers, end users, and other team members.
• Other software architect-related technical duties as assigned. This position requires a high degree of flexibility towards work assignments.

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 must be a U.S. citizen and be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Department of Defense security clearance at the Secret level.
• Candidate should have 12 or more years of relevant technical experience. Relevant academic, internship, research, or professional technical experience may be considered. Note: Advanced degrees and specifically relevant architecture training/certification may reduce the amount of experience required.
• Prior relevant technical experience must include developing, integrating, testing, and/or troubleshooting embedded software or embedded-adjacent applications that interface with, operate, monitor, support, simulate, control, or communicate with embedded systems.
• Candidate should have extensive knowledge of disciplined software engineering practices, such as requirements analysis, configuration management, version control, coding standards, peer review, unit and integration testing, automated testing frameworks, and software verification.
• Candidate must demonstrate strong competency in formulating and expressing software architectures using one or more industry-recognized design techniques or notations, along with the ability to quickly learn and effectively apply unfamiliar design techniques.
• Candidate must be able to evaluate software architectures against functional requirements, system-level quality attributes, performance constraints, integration risks, and lifecycle considerations, including documenting and communicating architectural decisions and their rationale.
• Candidate must demonstrate competency with one or more architectural design patterns, one or more detailed design patterns, and object-oriented design principles.
• Candidate must be familiar with one or more embedded processor architectures and their application in microcontrollers, systems-on-chip (SoCs), systems-on-modules (SoMs), or similar implementations.
• Candidate must demonstrate substantial knowledge of design considerations for performance-constrained and real-time embedded systems, including several of the following: RTOS-based designs, safety-critical software, hardware/software integration, deterministic memory management, concurrency and multithreading, headless operation, real-time scheduling, hard and soft real-time constraints, and embedded communication protocols (e.g., MIL-STD-1553, ARINC 429, CAN, or similar).
• Candidate must demonstrate strong competency in at least one relevant embedded programming language (C, C++, or Rust) and understand the implications and tradeoffs of software design decisions when implemented in these languages or other high-level languages, such as Java, C#, or Python.
• Aptitude with one or more architecture tools/IDEs (e.g., Cameo Systems Modeler, Rhapsody, Visio, PlantUML, Diagram-As-Code, or similar).
• Candidate must demonstrate strong quantitative, analytical, technical leadership, and communication skills, with the ability to work across technical disciplines and multiple product teams. Candidate must exhibit strong character, professionalism, and technical judgment; advocate for technically sound decisions; constructively challenge assumptions; and uphold high standards for accuracy and quality. Candidate must also demonstrate the ability to participate effectively in peer reviews by submitting work for review, incorporating constructive technical feedback, and providing constructive reviews of others' work.
• Candidate must be willing to perform a portion of the work in-person at the company site.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with one or more Government Reference Architectures.
• Experience with applicable industry standards, frameworks, and process models (e.g., ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207, CMMI, DO-178 and/or DO-278, RMF, MIL-STD-882, MISRA).
• Experience developing software technical data and deliverables in accordance with Data Item Descriptions (DIDs) applicable to software.
• Experience using AI to assist with software specification, design, coding, testing, and/or technical document generation.
• Experience using AI/ML models in the integrated solution, such as for autonomous behaviors or adaptive algorithms.
• Experience with FPGA-based systems, including hardware/software partitioning and integration with programmable logic.
• Experience in the design and implementation of time-critical software for integrated systems, such as real-time control software, hardware-in-the-loop simulation, sensors, vehicles, medical devices, or IoT components.
• Experience with hardware/software integration, bootloaders, and use of tools such as JTAG debuggers, logic analyzers, logs, oscilloscopes, protocol analyzers, RTOS-specific build, trace, and profiling tools, or similar development tools.
• Aptitude with Linux and Windows operating systems and their administrative features.

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo - because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 - and moving faster than anyone else dares.

Original Posting:

For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.