ALMDS Senior Principal Software Engineer
Northrop Grumman · Melbourne, FL
$122,800–$184,200from the description
Jun 28, 2026
Melbourne, FL
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior software engineering role focused on the full development lifecycle — from requirements and design through integration, testing, and maintenance — for large-scale aerospace software systems. The position involves solving complex integration problems, leading or mentoring other engineers, and interfacing with program management and government customers. Strong C/C++ or C# experience is required, with a Secret clearance needed from day one.
Senior level · 8+ years · Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL · 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 2 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
What the occupation pays Median $131,760 (middle half $101,910–$163,040). 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 (8)
The title 'Sr. Principal Software Engineer' is advertised at Principal level, but the actual scope and experience requirements (8 years with a BS, full-lifecycle development, team leadership within a project) are consistent with a Senior engineer, not a true org-wide Principal.
The years requirement is tiered by degree: 8 years with a Bachelor's, 6 with a Master's, 4 with a PhD. No degree is hard-required — equivalent experience is implicitly accepted via the tiered structure, so the degree requirement is set to None.
C, C++, and C# are listed together in the Basic Qualifications as a group ('Software development/implementation experience in C, C++, C#'). The JD treats them as a set of acceptable OOP languages rather than three independent hard gates; they are captured as a trio of must-have skills with each listed as an alternative to the others.
MFC is mentioned in the description body as 'a plus' and again under Preferred Qualifications — treated as preferred throughout.
FPGA, VHDL, VxWorks, image processing, classifiers, WPF, Avalonia, MVVM, TCP/IP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Visual Studio, Git, Confluence, and Agile all appear exclusively under Preferred Qualifications.
MVVM is an architectural pattern rather than a named tool/technology and is omitted from the skills list per extraction rules.
A Secret clearance is required to start, as explicitly stated in the posting header and Basic Qualifications.
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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