Description
At Leidos, we are advancing mission-critical platforms that simulate, interact with, and act on complex technical and business environments. These platforms enable teams to engage with network operations, automate business processes, and gain insight through intent-driven and agent-based systems.
The Senior Software Engineer / Technical Lead is a hands-on technical leader responsible for building and evolving platforms that simulate complex systems, automate operations, and enable AI- and agent-driven interaction with technical and business environments. This role combines deep individual contribution with technical leadership. You will actively write code, build agents, and design AI-enabled services while also guiding architecture, mentoring engineers, and ensuring that software, infrastructure, systems engineering, and security are integrated into a cohesive, compliant development lifecycle.
Primary Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain distributed systems and microservices (hands-on coding role)
- Build, integrate, and evolve intelligent agents and AI-enabled services using LLMs and automation frameworks
- Define and implement patterns for agent orchestration, system interaction, and decision workflows
- Drive adoption of Infrastructure as Code, automation, and “controls-as-code” practices
- Partner closely with systems engineers and ISSEs to embed requirements and security into platform design and code
- Establish development standards for GitHub-based collaboration, testing, and documentation
- Mentor mid-level engineers through code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance
- Lead integration of CI/CD pipelines, security tooling, and ATO considerations into everyday development
- Collaborate with stakeholders to translate mission and operational needs into scalable technical solutions
- Contribute to an “everything as code” approach, expressing infrastructure, automation, agent behavior, workflows, and operational artifacts as version-controlled, testable code
- Define and promote patterns for expressing intent, requirements, automation, and controls as code, enabling consistency, traceability, and automation across the development lifecycle
Required Skills and Experience
- BS degree and 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Demonstrated experience designing and building complex or distributed systems
- Strong hands-on experience developing backend services and microservices
- Experience working with AI/ML systems, including LLM integration in production environments
- Strong background in cloud-native architectures and Infrastructure as Code
- Experience delivering software in secure, regulated, or compliance-driven environments
- Ability to bridge software development, systems engineering, and security disciplines
- Strong technical communication and leadership skills
- Must have and maintain a Secret security clearance
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building agent-based or autonomous systems in production
- Familiarity with AI orchestration frameworks and patterns (e.g., tool-using agents, multi-agent systems)
- Experience supporting ATO through automation, documentation, and technical leadership
- Active Security+ certification or equivalent IAT Level II certification
- Background mentoring engineers and leading technical decision-making
- Passion for applying AI and automation to real-world operational challenges
- Experience applying “as code” approaches beyond infrastructure (e.g., configuration-as-code, policy-as-code, workflows-as-code, documentation-as-code)