Distributed Messaging Domain Lead - Principal Engineer

SciTec; Princeton (NJ); On-site; USD 164,000 - 218,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401k match

Health insurance

Vision insurance

Life insurance

Disability insurance

Profit sharing

Parental leave

Paid time off

Flexible work hours

Job summary

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead workload communications domain, guiding design of data and control flow across processes and services. The role blends hands-on coding with technical stewardship to improve distributed workloads for mission-critical data processing and visualization.

The ideal candidate will have deep experience with messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, MQTT) and RPCs (gRPC/ZeroMQ), strong delivery semantics, and the

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physical Sciences, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of professional experience with distributed communication systems.
• 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).
• 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 ability to influence engineering practices through technical credibility.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Assess current communication technologies, patterns, and gaps across teams.
• Define evaluation criteria and run load tests to select core communication technologies and patterns.
• Document recommended technologies and ADRs with guides and references.
• Build validated reference implementations and starter templates for common use cases.
• Guide choice between synchronous, asynchronous, event streaming, and other patterns.
• Establish practices for delivery guarantees, ordering, retries, deduplication, and idempotency.
• Guide backpressure, buffering, batching, flow control, and concurrency design.
• Optimize throughput, latency, serialization overhead, network utilization, and memory pressure.
• Establish schema evolution practices for data contracts.
• Guide partitioning, fan-out, replay, retention, and consumer-group design.
• Establish fault handling, dead-letter processing, observability, and recovery practices.
• Collaborate with engineers through pair programming and reviews to drive adoption of best practices.
• Work with Data Storage and Deployment domains on cross-domain issues like consumer lag and tracing.
• Periodically reassess and update recommendations as tech and workloads change.
• Track adoption and outcomes against baselines and report to leadership.

Skills

Distributed messaging

Event streaming

RPC systems

Backpressure and fault handling

Linux development

Code review and mentoring

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering/Math/Physics

Tools

Kafka

RabbitMQ

ActiveMQ

MQTT

gRPC

ZeroMQ

Job description

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead workload communications domain, guiding design of data and control flow across processes and services. The role blends hands-on coding with technical stewardship to improve distributed workloads for mission-critical data processing and visualization.

The ideal candidate will have deep experience with messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, MQTT) and RPCs (gRPC/ZeroMQ), strong delivery semantics, and the