Principal Software Engineer - Workload Communications Domain Lead

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company is a dynamic non-traditional defense contractor that delivers advanced technologies in support of U.S. National Security and Defense. For the past forty-five plus years, we have supported Department of Defense customers by developing innovative remote sensing algorithms, tools, and techniques to deliver world-class data exploitation capabilities supporting missile defense; intelligence, surveillance, & reconnaissance; space domain awareness; and aircraft survivability missions.

• →Assess current communication technologies, patterns, recurring problems, and capability gaps across engineering teams.
• →Define evaluation criteria and use load tests and benchmarks under representative traffic and failure conditions to select and maintain a Core Collection of recommended communication technologies, patterns, and practices.
• →Document recommended technologies, valid alternatives, and exceptional cases through decision guides, reference architectures, architecture decision records (ADRs), and tuning and troubleshooting guides.
• →Build and maintain validated reference implementations, starter templates, and shared libraries for common communication use cases.
• →Guide the choice between synchronous request/response, asynchronous messaging, event streaming, and other communication patterns.
• →Establish practices for delivery guarantees, ordering, retries, deduplication, and idempotency.
• →Guide backpressure, buffering, batching, flow control, and consumer concurrency design.
• →Optimize throughput, latency, serialization overhead, network utilization, and memory pressure.
• →Establish practices for message schemas, data contracts, and backward- and forward-compatible schema evolution.
• →Guide partitioning, fan-out, replay, retention, and consumer-group design.
• →Establish practices for fault handling, dead-letter processing, observability, and recovery.
• →Partner with engineers through pair programming, design and code reviews, troubleshooting, and focused workshops to support consistent adoption of recommended practices.
• →Collaborate with Data Storage and Deployment Environments domain leads on cross-domain problems such as consumer lag, memory pressure, distributed tracing, and end-to-end throughput and latency.
• →Periodically reassess and update recommendations and documentation as technologies, workloads, and engineering needs change.
• →Track adoption and engineering outcomes against established baselines and report results to engineering leadership.
• →Perform other duties as assigned.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physical Sciences, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of professional experience designing, implementing, and troubleshooting production software systems, including significant experience with distributed communication systems.
• Deep production experience with one or more message brokers or event streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, MQTT).
• Experience with one or more RPC or low-level messaging frameworks (e.g., gRPC, ZeroMQ).
• Strong understanding of delivery semantics, ordering, idempotency, backpressure, and fault handling in distributed systems.
• Experience with serialization formats and schema evolution (e.g., Protocol Buffers, Avro, FlatBuffers, JSON Schema).
• Demonstrated ability to load test and profile communication paths, analyze results, and turn findings into actionable recommendations.
• Experience evaluating technical alternatives and clearly articulating their tradeoffs.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as C++, Python, Go, Rust, Java, or TypeScript/Node.js.
• Comfortable working in Linux development environments.
• Strong technical writing, mentoring, and cross-team communication skills, with the ability to influence engineering practices through technical credibility.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance.

Candidates with the following qualifications will be preferred:

• Experience leading technology standardization, technical governance, or internal platform/guidance efforts across multiple teams.
• Experience with high-throughput or low-latency data pipelines, including network and memory performance tuning.
• Experience with distributed tracing and observability tooling (e.g., OpenTelemetry).
• Experience running messaging systems in containerized or Kubernetes environments.
• Familiarity with mission data workflows or sensor processing architectures.
• Active DoD Secret clearance or higher.

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