Principal Systems Engineer

The Transportation Solution Division within the Leidos Civil group is seeking a Senior Systems Engineer who will be a member of a dynamic team working Future Flight Services Program (FFSP), providing briefing and flight planning for the nation's general aviation community.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Review the FAA requirement documents, advisory circulars, and applicable regulations (e.g., 14 CFR parts) to extract intent, constraints, and acceptance criteria.
• Identify and engage with customer stakeholders to identify use cases with an emphasis on completeness, testability, alignment with operational workflows, and readiness for validation trials.
• Decompose high-level regulatory requirements into specific, testable capability statements (agile features) featuring clear acceptance criteria mapped to FAA compliance outcomes (e.g., performance thresholds, safety margins, required reporting formats).
• Systematically capture and communicate design decisions, performance trade-offs, regulatory compliance rationales, and risk assessments with each release, enabling reviewers to trace your decision-making process and provide informed feedback.
• Prepare and review technical documentation, including use cases, user interface specifications, and requirements traceability.
• Lead and participate in structured reviews and inspections.
• Direct technical teams in the design, implementation, and delivery of product solutions.
• Cultivates a collaborative environment by sharing expertise and empowering emerging talent within the team.
• Engage with senior executive leadership regarding matters of strategic importance related to product solutions.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field and at least 12 years of relevant experience
• Experience and familiarity with agile methodology and principles
• Familiarity with the role of the Agile Product Owner, including owning and prioritizing the product backlog, defining complete product backlog items (user stories), making timely decisions on scope, and acceptance of work
• Strong understanding of rigid engineering processes, including attention to detail
• Past practical exposure to writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining software or scripts
• Clear and effective verbal and written communication
• Experience in engaging customers to understand needs, deliver solutions, manage expectations, and maintain an ongoing relationship
• Ability to obtain SF-85 Public Trust Clearance Level
• US Citizenship

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Java, Python, and scripting languages
• Knowledge of air traffic control systems, general aviation, and/or flight services.
• Practical knowledge of FAA/DoD systems, technical policies, standards and orders.

Experience with leveraging requirement-management tools (CAMEO, DOORS, Jama, Jira with traceability plugins, etc) and documentation platforms that support linking, reviews, and exportable RTMs.

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 — and moving faster than anyone else dares.

For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.