Staff Engineer Software at Northrop Grumman
Dulles, VA
$177,000–$265,600from the description
Jun 28, 2026
Dulles, VA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior-level role leading a classified ground software development team within a tactical space program, requiring on-site work in a SCIF. Day-to-day responsibilities span the full software lifecycle — design, implementation, testing, and integration — alongside mentoring engineers, supporting customer working groups, and driving adoption of modern tooling such as containers, CI/CD pipelines, and Linux-based automation. Suits an experienced software engineer with prior team leadership background and an active Top Secret clearance.
Senior level · 12+ years · Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV · Top Secret clearance · Full-time
Advertised as Staff, 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
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $154,930 (middle half $123,720–$176,230). 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 (7)
The title is 'Staff Ground Software Engineer' but the actual requirements (12+ years, component/team-level scope, no org-wide technical authority) support a Senior band rather than Staff. The 'Staff' label here appears to be Northrop Grumman's internal grade rather than the cross-team technical leadership scope that defines the Staff band in this schema.
The role has meaningful people-leadership duties (leading a team of software developers, mentoring, supporting career growth), making 11-3021 a plausible runner-up, but the primary day-to-day work described is hands-on software development and technical leadership, so 15-1252 is the better fit.
Docker and Kubernetes appear in the Basic Qualifications section with 'preferred' appended ('Docker containerization, Kubernetes (K8s) orchestration preferred'), creating ambiguity. Because they sit within the required qualifications block and carry a specific years demand (2+), they are treated as hard gates; the word 'preferred' is read as a substitution qualifier rather than a demotion to optional.
The degree requirement accepts equivalent experience in lieu of a degree (16 years total), so the degree requirement is set to None.
The clearance gate is an active DoD Top Secret at time of application; the posting also mentions the ability to obtain special program access (SCI-adjacent), but the hard gate stated is Top Secret — classified as TopSecret accordingly.
CI/CD pipelines and Atlassian tools appear under Preferred Qualifications as separate line items; Jenkins/GitLab CI are already captured as required from the Basic Qualifications block.
Requires a Top 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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