Principal/Sr Principal Infrastructure Software Engineer
About The Position
Northrop Grumman Defense Systems is seeking Principal or Senior Principal Software Engineers for its Global C2 Solutions Business Unit in Huntsville, Alabama. The role supports the Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS) program on Agile Software Teams, working with software, systems, hardware, and IT engineers to build robust, secure, and scalable software solutions for Global C2 missions. The engineer will design and implement containerization and virtualization strategies to migrate mission-critical command and control software to modern runtime environments. The work includes decomposing the application into containerized services or components, developing and maintaining container build artifacts and virtual machine images, administering orchestration and virtualization platforms, and optimizing performance, scalability, and reliability. The role also integrates workloads into CI/CD pipelines, maintains monitoring and security practices, collaborates on migration activities, and produces operational documentation. The position requires an active Secret clearance and CompTIA Security+. The listed salary range is $108,800–$163,200 for the primary level and $135,800–$203,600 for the secondary level. The role involves travel 10% of the time; relocation assistance is not available.
Requirements
- For Principal Software Engineer: a bachelor's degree in a STEM field and at least 5 years of relevant experience, 3 years with a master's degree, or 1 year with a PhD.
- For Senior Principal Software Engineer: a bachelor's degree in a STEM field and at least 8 years of relevant experience, 6 years with a master's degree, or 4 years with a PhD.
- Active Secret clearance.
- CompTIA Security+ certification.
- Object-oriented software development experience in Java and C++.
- Experience with modern configuration management and source control tools, such as Git or GitLab.
- Experience with containerization technologies, such as Docker or Podman.
- Experience orchestrating containers using Kubernetes or similar platforms, such as OpenShift or Rancher.
- Familiarity with creating, maintaining, and securing container images, including Dockerfiles, image scanning, and SBOMs.
- Experience with container registries, such as GitLab Container Registry, Nexus, Harbor, ECR, ACR, or GCR.
- Experience with virtualization platforms, such as VMware vSphere/ESXi, KVM, VirtualBox, or Hyper-V.
- Understanding of Linux system administration, including networking, storage, and security in virtualized and containerized environments.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code and deployment automation, such as Ansible, Terraform, or Helm.
- Experience with monitoring and logging solutions for containers and virtual machines, such as Prometheus, Grafana, or ELK/EFK.
- Strong experience with CI/CD concepts and implementation.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with Agile development using SAFe and Atlassian tools such as Jira and Confluence.
- CI/CD experience in classified or highly controlled environments.
- Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining test bench and benchmarking CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience defining CI/CD requirements, user stories, and use cases in partnership with development and test teams.
- Experience collaborating with software developers, system administrators, cybersecurity, and operations teams.
- Experience supporting real-time or distributed systems using RTI/DDS publish/subscribe middleware.
- Experience with tactical data links and external interfaces such as MIL-STD-6016 (Link 16), Blue Force Tracker (BFT), IBS, ADS-B, or similar systems.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement containerization and virtualization strategies to migrate a large, complex software application to modern runtime environments.
- Decompose the existing application into containerized services or components, defining images, runtimes, and resource allocations.
- Develop and maintain container build artifacts, such as Dockerfiles and Helm charts, and virtual machine images.
- Stand up and administer container orchestration and virtualization platforms, such as Kubernetes/OpenShift and VMware or similar.
- Optimize application performance, scalability, and reliability in containerized and virtualized environments, including resource usage and networking.
- Integrate containerized and virtualized components into CI/CD pipelines to automate build, test, deployment, and rollback processes.
- Implement and maintain monitoring, logging, and alerting for containers, virtual machines, and supporting infrastructure.
- Apply security best practices to container and VM workloads, including image scanning, access controls, patching, and configuration hardening.
- Collaborate with software developers, system administrators, cybersecurity, and operations teams to plan and execute migration activities with minimal disruption.
- Produce and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and configuration records for operations, sustainment, and future enhancements.
Benefits
- Health insurance coverage.
- Life and disability insurance.
- Savings plan.
- Company-paid holidays.
- Paid time off (PTO) for vacation and/or personal business.
- Employees may be eligible for overtime, shift differential, and a discretionary bonus, depending on the position.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
