Principal/Sr Principal Infrastructure Software Engineer

Description

The company's Global C2 Solutions unit in Huntsville, Alabama, is hiring Principal and Senior Principal Software Engineers within its defense systems group.

The work moves a large, mission-critical C2 application into containers and virtual machines. You will support a major battle command program run by Agile software teams.

You will work alongside software, systems, hardware and IT engineers to build reliable, secure and scalable software for Global C2 missions, with hands-on development and hard technical problems at the center of the role.

Responsibilities

• Plan and build containers and virtual machines that move a large application onto modern runtime platforms.
• Break the existing application into containerized services or components, choosing suitable images, runtimes and resource allocations.
• Write and maintain container build files, such as Dockerfiles and Helm charts, along with virtual machine images, so builds stay consistent, repeatable and secure.
• Set up and run container orchestration and virtualization platforms, such as Kubernetes or OpenShift and VMware or similar, to host the application.
• Tune resource use, networking, scalability and reliability across containerized and virtualized environments.
• Connect containers and virtual machines to CI/CD pipelines so that build, test, deployment and rollback run automatically.
• Build and maintain monitoring, logging and alerting for containers, virtual machines and supporting infrastructure.
• Apply security practices to container and VM workloads, including image scanning, access controls, patching and configuration hardening.
• Work with developers, system administrators, cybersecurity and operations teams to plan and carry out migration steps with minimal disruption.
• Write and keep up technical documentation, runbooks and configuration records for operations, sustainment and future changes.

Requirements

• Principal Software Engineer: bachelor's degree in a STEM field and at least 5 years of relevant experience, or 3 years with a master's, or 1 year with a PhD.
• Senior Principal Software Engineer: bachelor's degree in a STEM field and at least 8 years of relevant experience, or 6 years with a master's, or 4 years with a PhD.
• Active Secret clearance.
• CompTIA Security+ certification.
• Object-oriented software development experience in Java and C++.
• Experience with configuration management and source control tools, such as Git and GitLab.
• Experience with containerization technologies, such as Docker or Podman.
• Experience orchestrating containers with Kubernetes or similar platforms, such as OpenShift or Rancher.
• Familiarity with building, maintaining and securing container images, including Dockerfiles, image scanning and SBOMs.
• Experience with container registries, such as GitLab Container Registry, Nexus, Harbor, or ECR, ACR or GCR.
• Experience with virtualization platforms, such as VMware vSphere or ESXi, KVM, VirtualBox or Hyper-V.
• Understanding of Linux system administration, covering 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 tools for containers and virtual machines, such as Prometheus, Grafana or ELK/EFK.
• Strong working knowledge of CI/CD concepts and implementation.
• Preferred: Agile development using SAFe, with Atlassian tools such as Jira and Confluence.
• Preferred: CI/CD work in classified or highly controlled environments.
• Preferred: designing, implementing and maintaining test bench and benchmarking CI/CD pipelines.
• Preferred: defining CI/CD requirements, user stories and use cases with development and test teams.
• Preferred: partnering with developers, system administrators, cybersecurity and operations staff.
• Preferred: supporting real-time or distributed systems using RTI/DDS publish/subscribe middleware.
• Preferred: tactical data links and external interfaces, such as MIL-STD-6016 (Link 16), Blue Force Tracker (BFT), IBS, ADS-B or similar systems.

Conditions

Secret clearance is required for start.

No relocation assistance is available.

Travel is about 10% of the time.

Requisition code: HSVFall2026.

Primary level salary range: $108,800.00 to $163,200.00. Secondary level salary range: $135,800.00 to $203,600.00.

These ranges are a general guide. The company weighs scope, responsibilities, experience, education, skills and current market conditions when setting base pay.

The application window is estimated at 20 days from the posting date. It may close earlier or later depending on business needs and candidate availability.

Benefits

• Depending on the role, you may be eligible for overtime, shift differential and a discretionary bonus on top of base pay.
• Annual bonuses reward individual contributions and let you share in company results.
• Vice President and Director roles may be eligible for long-term incentives.
• Health insurance, life and disability insurance, a savings plan, paid company holidays, and paid time off for vacation or personal business.