Position: Senior Developer / Product Owner

Location: Colorado Springs, CO

At Leidos, we tackle complex challenges that matter. Our teams deliver innovative, mission-driven solutions powered by diverse talent, technical excellence, and a shared commitment to doing what’s right—for our customers, our people, and our world. If you thrive at the intersection of deep technical work and strategic influence, this role offers the chance to shape the future of a major mission-critical system.

Your Next Career Challenge

We’re seeking a Senior Developer / Product Owner with strong hands-on experience in Java and C to support a large, long-lived system that blends legacy components with modernized services. This role is ideal for a senior engineer who enjoys diving into complex codebases, understanding systems end-to-end, and using that insight to drive architecture, modernization, and technical direction. You’ll remain deeply engaged in design and development while owning the technical roadmap for key subsystems.

This position reports directly to the Chief Engineer.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership & Development

• Serve as a senior individual contributor working directly in Java and C codebases across legacy and modernized components.

• Analyze code to understand system behavior, data flow, and performance characteristics.

• Provide mentorship on design patterns, refactoring strategies, and implementation best practices.

• Conduct code reviews focused on quality, maintainability, performance, and architectural alignment.

Technical Product Ownership

• Develop a deep understanding of the system architecture, including services, middleware, databases, and external interfaces.

• Understand how components are built, deployed, configured, and operated in production environments.

• Own and manage the technical backlog for assigned subsystems.

• Translate mission needs and stakeholder requirements into actionable, technically sound implementation plans.

• Balance feature development, defect resolution, technical debt reduction, and modernization priorities.

• Support refactoring and modularization of legacy Java and C applications to improve maintainability and deployment flexibility.

• Contribute to containerization and deployment-readiness efforts by identifying required code changes.

• Collaborate closely with development, DevOps, and test teams to resolve technical issues.

• Act as a bridge between engineering teams and program leadership, ensuring technical realities are clearly communicated and understood.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, or related discipline with 8 years of professional software development experience. Additional experience, training, and/or certifications may be considered in lieu of degree requirement.

• US Citizen; currently possessing an active DoD Secret clearance.

• Extensive hands-on experience with Java in enterprise or distributed systems.

• Strong C development experience, especially in performance-sensitive or system-level applications.

• Experience working with large, complex, long-lived codebases.

• Ability to analyze unfamiliar code and quickly build system-level understanding.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in computer science, software engineering, or related discipline with 6 years of professional software development experience.

• Experience as a technical lead, lead engineer, or technical product owner.

• Background in refactoring or modernizing legacy Java and C systems.

• Familiarity with containerization and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).

• Experience with distributed systems, messaging frameworks, or service-oriented architecture.

• Prior work supporting defense, aerospace, or other mission-critical environments.

What Success Looks Like

• You can clearly articulate how major Java and C components interact, where risks exist, and what changes are feasible.

• Development teams trust your judgment because you understand the code—not just the roadmap.

• Stakeholders rely on you to translate mission needs into realistic, technically grounded plans.

• The system becomes more understandable, maintainable, and adaptable under your guidance.

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 — and moving faster than anyone else dares.

Original Posting:

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.