Lead Distributed Messaging Architect

SciTec; Huntsville (AL); On-site; USD 151,000 - 201,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

4% Safe Harbor 401(k) match

Company-paid Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Life insurance

Long-term Disability insurance

Paid Parental Leave

Profit-Sharing Plan

Discretionary Performance Bonus

Generous Paid Time Off

Flexible Work Hours

Job summary

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead our Workload Communications Domain. You will guide design and optimization of data and control flows across processes, services, containers, and distributed workloads that support mission-critical data processing and visualization.

This hands-on leadership role requires deep expertise in distributed messaging, event streaming, and RPC systems, with a track record of mentoring teams and delivering reference

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physical Sciences, or a related technical field.

Responsibilities

• Assess current communication technologies, patterns, recurring problems, and capability gaps across engineering teams.
• Define evaluation criteria and use load tests and benchmarks under representative traffic and failure conditions to select and maintain a Core Collection of recommended communication technologies, patterns, and practices.
• Document recommended technologies, valid alternatives, and exceptional cases through decision guides, reference architectures, architecture decision records (ADRs), and tuning and troubleshooting guides.
• Build and maintain validated reference implementations, starter templates, and shared libraries for common communication use cases.
• Guide the choice between synchronous request/response, asynchronous messaging, event streaming, and other communication patterns.
• Establish practices for delivery guarantees, ordering, retries, deduplication, and idempotency.
• Guide backpressure, buffering, batching, flow control, and consumer concurrency design.
• Optimize throughput, latency, serialization overhead, network utilization, and memory pressure.
• Establish practices for message schemas, data contracts, and backward- and forward-compatible schema evolution.
• Guide partitioning, fan-out, replay, retention, and consumer-group design.
• Establish practices for fault handling, dead-letter processing, observability, and recovery.
• Partner with engineers through pair programming, design and code reviews, troubleshooting, and focused workshops to support consistent adoption of recommended practices.
• Collaborate with Data Storage and Deployment Environments domain leads on cross-domain problems such as consumer lag, memory pressure, distributed tracing, and end-to-end throughput and latency.
• Periodically reassess and update recommendations and documentation as technologies, workloads, and engineering needs change.
• Track adoption and engineering outcomes against established baselines and report results to engineering leadership.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Skills

Distributed messaging

Event streaming

RPC systems

Load testing

Backpressure & flow control

Linux development

Mentoring / guidance

C++/Python/Go/Java/TypeScript

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kafka

RabbitMQ

ActiveMQ

MQTT

gRPC

ZeroMQ

Job description

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead our Workload Communications Domain. You will guide design and optimization of data and control flows across processes, services, containers, and distributed workloads that support mission-critical data processing and visualization.

This hands-on leadership role requires deep expertise in distributed messaging, event streaming, and RPC systems, with a track record of mentoring teams and delivering reference