Principal Engineer, Software Architect (R4562)

WHAT YOU’LL DO:

• Define and evolve the system‑wide software architecture for XBAT, spanning airborne vehicle, ground station, and autonomy layers. 
• Translate safety and security goals into technical requirements, standards, and design patterns that guide engineers across multiple software teams. 
• Ensure architecture supports safety‑critical and cyber‑relevant workflows. This includes formalizing architecture decisions, traceability, and compliance pathways appropriate for advanced airborne systems. 
• Drive cross‑team alignment on APIs, data flows, fault handling, verification strategy, and risk management so mission, vehicle, and autonomy components integrate cleanly. 
• Partner with engineering leadership, system architects, and validation teams to balance innovation speed with rigorous assurance practices. 
• Set technical direction for long‑term scalability: modularity, maintainability, testability, and support for future capability growth or certification needs. 
• Mentor senior engineers and architects, raising the bar for design rigor, documentation quality, and architectural judgment across the organization. 
• Produce and maintain architecture artifacts: high‑level system diagrams, component interfaces, data models, risk analyses, and design rationales. 
• Lead technical reviews for major features, changes, or integration points; ensure alignment with architectural standards and safety/security constraints. 
• Define architecture governance: decision records, change control processes, quality gates, and collaboration flows among development, verification, and operations. 
• Collaborate with systems, hardware, and avionics teams to manage boundaries, timing, resource allocation, and failure modes that affect overall aircraft and mission performance. 
• Drive technology evaluation and roadmap: select or validate frameworks, middleware, and tooling that meet performance, assurance, and cyber‑hardening needs. 
• Support external or internal readiness evaluations: provide architectural evidence, participate in reviews, and help the program articulate compliance posture as requirements evolve. 
• Advocate for continuous improvement in architecture practice: metrics, architecture reviews, knowledge sharing, and onboarding for new team members. 

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Deep expertise in software architecture for complex, multi‑domain systems—ideally aerospace, defense, autonomous systems, or similarly safety‑critical fields. 
• Proven track record designing and delivering production software that must satisfy stringent safety, security, or mission assurance requirements. 
• Strong systems thinking: able to navigate tradeoffs across performance, latency, reliability, testability, and certification or compliance considerations. 
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to convey architecture vision and rationale to engineers, program leads, and stakeholders. 
• Experience driving architecture adoption and discipline across multiple teams, not just authoring designs in isolation. 
• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace, or a closely related field, or equivalent practical experience. 

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Familiarity with aerospace software assurance frameworks or standards that guide high‑assurance airborne software development.  
• Experience working on or integrating autonomy, mission planning, or AI‑enabled software into real‑world systems. 
• Strong understanding of cyber hardening and secure design practices for distributed or networked vehicle systems and ground infrastructure. 
• Prior leadership or mentor role with responsibility for building and scaling architecture practices and design culture in a fast‑moving engineering organization. 
• Experience dealing with constrained platforms: real‑time requirements, limited compute, or avionics‑style integration challenges. 
• Hands‑on experience in VTOL or other advanced aircraft programs, or in programs that require austere operations, long‑range operations, or resilient autonomy. 
• Exposure to end‑to‑end product lifecycle from concept through flight test or operational deployment. 
• Practical knowledge of modern software tooling that supports traceability, CI/CD, automated verification, static analysis, or high‑assurance pipelines. 
• Comfort working in a highly collaborative, fast‑paced environment where requirements can evolve quickly and architecture must adapt without losing rigor.