Senior Principal Software Engineer, Ground System Software Architect

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Ground System Software Architect

Position Title: Sr. Principal Software Engineer, Ground System Software Architect

Work Location: Albuquerque, NM (preferred) or Herndon, VA

Clearance Requirement: Active Top-Secret security clearance and the ability to maintain the clearance required. U.S. citizenship is required to obtain a clearance.

Employment Type: Full-time

About Us: BlackVe, Inc. is a mission-first, dynamic, and innovative national security-focused company focused on emerging space and advanced technologies dedicated to pushing the boundaries of engineering excellence in support of our government customers.

Job Description:

We're looking for a Ground Software Systems Architect to lead the design, integration, and delivery of the ground software system behind our commercial space domain awareness (SDA) platform. Success in this role depends as much on architecture, interface definition, and vendor coordination as it does on writing code.

The ideal candidate sits at the intersection of systems engineering and software engineering: someone who can translate mission needs into concrete requirements, define and validate interfaces between components, evaluate and integrate commercial and open-source tooling, and stay hands-on enough to guide implementation. You'll be a central technical voice, working across internal software, engineering, and program teams, external vendors, and customers.

Key Responsibilities and Essential Job Functions:

• Own the end-to-end architecture of the ground software system.
• Selection, integration, and orchestration of third-party space domain awareness analytics tools into a cohesive, maintainable platform.
• Generate, decompose, and manage system and software requirements, tracing them from mission objectives through to implementation and verification.
• Define, document, and validate interfaces (ICDs) between internal components, third-party tools, and external systems.
• Lead and coordinate development activities, setting technical direction and reviewing implementation against the architecture.
• Serve as a primary technical point of contact for external stakeholders, vendors, partners, and customers; communicating design decisions, tradeoffs, and status clearly.
• Design and deploy cloud infrastructure on AWS, with an emphasis on secure, compliant environments.
• Identify and mitigate technical risk across the system lifecycle, from concept through operations.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated experience architecting complex software systems, particularly those built from integrated third-party or COTS tools.
• Strong systems engineering fundamentals: requirements generation and management, interface definition, and verification.
• Software engineering proficiency is sufficient to guide implementation, evaluate technical work hands-on, and contribute to development of APIs and Python scripts.
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating workloads on AWS.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with a track record of engaging directly with external partners and customers.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with AWS GovCloud and deploying in regulated or security-sensitive environments.
• Background in space domain awareness, satellite ground systems, and the broader space/aerospace domain.
• Familiarity with ground segment software (e.g., mission planning, tasking, tracking, telemetry, cataloging, or data processing pipelines).
• Experience integrating commercial SDA data sources or sensor networks.

Location and Travel Requirements:

• This position is based in Albuquerque, NM, with occasional travel to other company locations or partner facilities as needed.

Why Join Us:

• Mission first-Always. We prioritize delivering results that directly support space and intelligence community programs and national security objectives.
• We operate as one team, grounded in trust, accountability, and open collaboration, where individuals actively support one another to achieve shared mission success.
• Work on high-impact programs across space, ISR, and advanced technology domains supporting DoD and IC customers.
• Ownership-driven culture is founded in teamwork where every employee is an owner, with equity participation and a direct stake in our success.
• Competitive compensation and benefits package, including flexible time off; 401(k) with company contribution
• Constant opportunities for program and professional impact.

This position may include access to technology and/or data that is subject to U.S. export controls pursuant to ITAR and EAR. To comply with federal export controls, all persons hired must be a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, U.S. lawful permanent resident, refugee or asylee as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(A)(3), or must otherwise be eligible to obtain the required authorization from the U.S. Department of State and/or U.S. Department of Commerce as applicable.

This description formerly included application instructions which have been removed per refinement rules.

This position requires U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government security clearance, as required by the applicable government contract.