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 DevSecOps 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 merge, build, and configuration-management workflows.
Frontend Lead Focus Areas
The Frontend Lead will additionally support:
- Frontend architecture, legacy application knowledge, software licensing awareness, and full-system/subsystem interface understanding.
- Feature decomposition and planning based on encapsulation of product functions and subsystem design.
- Frontend development standards, component design, usability considerations, and integration with backend services.
- Product Owner responsibilities for an Agile team, including backlog prioritization, acceptance criteria, stakeholder coordination, and workforce oversight.
- Knowledge-management and training plans to help engineers develop lead-level capability and confirm understanding of assigned work.
Preferred Skills and Experience
We encourage you to apply if you have experience with:
- Leading, or serving as the deputy/backup lead for, delivery of a mature tactical, mission, or strategic software system.
- Software architecture, technical planning, feature decomposition, and system-level design.
- Frontend and/or backend development in distributed, multi-component systems.
- Go, Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, Java, C/C++, or other memory-safe/type-safe programming languages.
- Database design, data modeling, SQL, and backend-service development.
- Object-oriented software design and modern software-design principles.
- Data Distribution Service (DDS), middleware integration, and RTI DDS.
- Embedded software development, FreeRTOS, TCP/IP, and firmware-adjacent interfaces.
- Linux development or administration.
- Docker, Kubernetes, containerization, virtualization, and deployment automation.
- CI/CD, DevSecOps, automated testing, static analysis, production builds, and configuration management.
- Git, GitLab, source-control workflows, and merge/review practices.
- Software requirements decomposition; preliminary and critical design; implementation and unit testing; and requirements-based testing.
- Factory, hardware, or integration-test environments.
- Agile delivery, Product Owner responsibilities, or SAFe Agile Product Owner/Product Manager practices.
What Sets You Apart
- Strong technical judgment and the ability to guide engineers through complex or ambiguous technical decisions.
- Demonstrated ability to balance hands-on engineering work with team leadership, mentoring, planning, and stakeholder communication.
- Experience improving engineering processes, workflows, code quality, and automation in an established product environment.
- Ability to communicate technical risks, tradeoffs, estimates, and recommendations clearly to both technical and program stakeholders.
- Commitment to high-quality, maintainable, secure, and scalable software.
- Ability to lead a developing team, create clarity around expectations, and foster a collaborative and accountable engineering culture.
- Willingness to take reasonable, managed risks while maintaining disciplined engineering, testing, and configuration-management practices
Workplace Options:
This position is primarily on-site with opportunities for Hybrid work/Flex as allowable.
While on-site, you will be a part of the GDMS Pittsfield, Massachusetts Engineering Team.
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