Principal Software Engineer

General Dynamics - IT; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

General Dynamics - IT seeks a Principal Software Developer Senior to lead backend and full-stack engineering practices. You will steer architecture, data design, and high-impact distributed systems for government customers, enabling scalable, secure services.

You will mentor teams, drive modernization efforts from monoliths to microservices, and set patterns for API design, testing, and observability while partnering with product managers to deliver measurable business impact.

Qualifications

• Proven track record leading scalable distributed systems with measurable impact.
• Experience architecting microservices at scale with high throughput.
• Establish backend standards, practices, and patterns to improve quality.
• Experience with event-driven patterns, caching, and data consistency.
• Designing APIs (REST/GraphQL) serving customer facing apps.
• Modernization experience from monoliths to microservices or modern stacks.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and incident response.
• Cloud-native architectures with IaC and deployment patterns.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive backend and full-stack engineering practices and architecture.
• Lead development of scalable, secure distributed systems for government customers.
• Act as technical authority for system design and data architecture.
• Design service architectures, data pipelines, and infrastructure patterns.
• Deliver new features for core services including customer intake workflows.
• Collaborate with product managers to balance technical feasibility with business needs.
• Mentor engineers and establish career development pathways for backend specialists.
• Influence architecture decisions and drive large-scale initiatives.
• Work across the full stack when needed to resolve problems end-to-end.

Skills

Java

Python

Distributed systems

Microservices

API design

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

Kubernetes

Data modeling

Mentoring

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

GraphQL

Job description

PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPER SENIOR

What You’ll Do

• Define and drive the strategic direction for backend and full-stack engineering practices, architecture, and technical excellence across the organization
• Lead the development of scalable, reliable, and secure distributed systems that serve government customers
• Serve as the technical authority and thought leader for system architecture, data design, and engineering excellence
• Design and implement modern service architectures, data pipelines, and infrastructure patterns that enable team velocity and system reliability
• Deliver new features and improvements to our core services including major read/write paths for customer intake, application screening, and information dissemination
• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to balance technical feasibility with business requirements, making pragmatic trade-offs that deliver measurable impact
• Build and maintain shared libraries, service frameworks, and infrastructure patterns that enable consistency and reduce cognitive load
• Identify opportunities to modernize our backend systems and take ownership of large-scale technical initiatives that improve system quality, performance, and maintainability
• Establish and champion engineering best practices including API design, data modeling, testing strategies, observability patterns, security standards, and code quality
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels on backend technologies, distributed systems, and establish career development pathways for backend specialization
• Influence technical decisions across teams and serve as a strategic advisor on architecture and infrastructure initiatives
• Work across the full stack when needed to solve problems end-to-end – frontend and infrastructure experience is valuable but backend systems are your primary focus

What We’re Looking For Evidence of Engineering Accomplishment

• Demonstrated track record of leading and delivering multiple production-ready, scalable distributed systems with measurable business impact
• Proven experience architecting and implementing microservice architectures at scale with highthroughput and reliability requirements
• Track record of establishing backend engineering standards, practices, and architectural patterns that improve team productivity and system quality
• Working experience with distributed system patterns including event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, caching strategies, and data consistency patterns
• Experience designing and implementing APIs (REST, GraphQL, or similar) that serve as the foundation for customer-facing applications
• Strong understanding of system transformation patterns with practical experience leading modernization efforts from monoliths to microservices or legacy to modern stacks
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and alerting strategies including structured logging, metrics, tracing, and incident response
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures, infrastructure as code, and deployment patterns (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Experience with data architecture including relational and NoSQL databases, data modeling, migration strategies, and data governance

Technical Excellence

• Strong proficiency in modern programming languages (Java, Python, or similar) with deep understanding of language ecosystems and tooling
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles including consistency models, consensus algorithms, failure modes, and reliability patterns
• Working knowledge of cloud engineering paradigms, asynchronous systems, service integration patterns, and event-driven architectures
• Experience with automated testing strategies including unit testing, integration testing, contract testing, and end-to-end system testing
• Practical knowledge of system performance optimization, capacity planning, and cost optimization
• Understanding of security principles including authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets management, and secure coding practices
• Experience establishing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with automated testing, security scanning, and deployment strategies
• Familiarity with container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS), infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and DevOps practices

System Design & Architecture

• Demonstrated ability to design systems that balance consistency, availability, partition tolerance, performance, and cost
• Strong understanding of data architecture including database selection, schema design, indexing strategies, and query optimization
• Experience with message brokers, event streaming platforms (Kafka, SQS, EventBridge), and asynchronous processing patterns
• Ability to design for reliability including graceful degradation, circuit breakers, retry strategies, and disaster recovery
• Working knowledge of API design principles, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility patterns
• Understanding of system observability including structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics aggregation, and alerting strategies

Leadership, Ownership, & Communication

• Demonstrated ability to lead large-scale technical initiatives from vision to production, influencing outcomes across multiple teams
• Quality driven, sets the standard for excellence in communication, code, and documentation
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts and strategic vision clearly to engineers, product managers, executives, and external stakeholders
• Proven track record of mentoring and developing engineers at all levels, building organizational backend engineering capability
• Recognized advocate for sound engineering practices who establishes patterns and influences engineering culture
• Comfort leading cross-functional initiatives, making architectural decisions with organizational impact, and navigating technical/business trade-offs at the principal level

Required

• Must be a US Citizen and able to obtain and maintain Public Trust 6C