Principal/Sr Principal Software Engineer* at Northrop Grumman
Roy, UT
$98,400–$184,200from the description
Jul 11, 2026
Roy, UT
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A mid-to-senior AI engineering role supporting a defense program (Sentinel) in Roy, Utah, focused on designing and deploying end-to-end machine learning and AI systems. Day-to-day work spans algorithm development, LLM integration and deployment, agentic AI frameworks, and production-grade software across the full lifecycle from prototyping through qualification testing. Suits engineers with hands-on Python experience and practical familiarity with locally hosted and cloud-based large language models, requiring an active DoD Secret clearance.
Senior level · 5+ years · Ogden-Clearfield, UT · Secret clearance · Full-time
Advertised as Principal, but the requirements read as Senior.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 3 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $112,296 (middle half $88,576–$146,860). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
This is a dual-level posting covering both Principal AI Engineer Software (5+ years with BS, 3+ with MS, 0 with PhD) and Senior Principal AI Engineer Software (8+ years with BS, 3+ with MS, 0 with PhD). The overall years minimum is set to 5, the lower of the two gates. The salary range spans both levels: $98,400–$147,600 (Principal) and $122,800–$184,200 (Senior Principal).
The title advertises 'Principal/Senior Principal', which maps to the Principal advertised seniority band; however, the actual scope and experience requirements (5–8 years, team-level delivery) are consistent with a Senior individual contributor, not a true org-wide Principal.
Degree is not strictly required — the JD explicitly accepts 4 additional years of experience in lieu of a degree at both levels, so the degree requirement is set to None.
An active DoD Secret clearance with a reinvestigation within the last 6 years is a hard gate. The role also requires the ability to obtain Special Program Access (SAP), but SAP is not a standard clearance tier and is captured in this note rather than as a clearance level.
The role blends AI/ML algorithm development (data science) with production software engineering; the primary day-to-day work described — building and deploying end-to-end AI software systems — leans toward Software Developers (15-1252), with Data Scientists (15-2051) as a plausible alternative given the modeling and ML emphasis.
Multimodal LLM experience and RAG pipeline design appear only under Preferred Qualifications.
Ollama and Llama.cpp are listed as interchangeable examples of locally hosted LLM frameworks under the required qualifications; Ollama is used as the primary skill name with Llama.cpp as an alternative.
OpenAI/ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini are listed as interchangeable AI service API examples under required qualifications; OpenAI is used as the primary with the others as alternatives.
Requires a Secret clearance — the cleared population is a small fraction of this occupation, so the real candidate pool is materially smaller than the estimate below, which does not model clearance.
Read the full posting
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