The Payload and Ground Systems organization within the Northrop Grumman Space Systems pushes the boundaries of innovation, redefines engineering capabilities, and drives advances in various sciences. Our team is chartered with providing the skills, innovative technologies to develop, design, produce and sustain optimized product lines across the sector while providing a decisive advantage to the warfighter. Come be a part of our mission.
About our local organization: You'll be joining our Aurora Software and Controls Department which has 200+ Software Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Systems Administrators, Database Administrators, and Network Engineers from entry-level to the most senior chief engineers and architects. This engineering organization supports numerous programs within the Payload and Ground Systems organization. We have plenty of opportunity for career advancement into higher level technical roles or leadership positions. We are part of a larger local engineering organization that includes Systems Engineering and Hardware Engineering staff. This overall local engineering organization influences cross-program collaboration, professional development and training, as well as engagement and inclusion activities such as lunch-n-learns, campus events, and leadership mixers.
About the program: You’ll be joining an existing on-contract classified portfolio called Swordfish and one of its program’s we call “Starfleet” that is supporting a critical national security mission that is both in major development and operations. The program team is based in Aurora, CO yet has distributed team members located at several other Northrop Grumman sites across the US as well as at collaborating partner company sites. Some of the program’s baseline and environments are unclassified allowing some software development outside of a secure facility. The team located in Aurora is roughly 25 staff primarily composed of software developers organized into agile scrum teams that primarily work in two large rooms with cubicle like individual spaces (yet a few have dedicated offices) then has a high side integration, test, and deployment lab. The program’s culture is agile, fast-paced, high performing, proactive, collaborative, and welcoming of new ideas, technologies, and tools that could benefit the mission or help the team be more productive or produce a higher quality product.
About the job: As a Software Chief Product Owner, you’d be joining the Starfleet program. The Chief Product Owner (CPO) leads product strategy across multiple agile teams, ensuring alignment with customer needs/requirements and technical capabilities, informed by the Chief Engineer (CE) and Chief Architect (CA). The CPO will have to balance strategic vision with tactical execution, driving cross-team collaboration, backlog prioritization, and managing stakeholder expectations to deliver high-impact outcomes. The CPO is the technical authority responsible for executing overall software engineering effort on the program and directing the execution of all software engineering activities. The Starfleet program’s CPO has the following roles and responsibilities.
Basic Qualifications:
Must have an active U.S. Government DoD Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) security clearance at time of application.
Ability to pass a Counterintelligence Polygraph (CI-Poly) (not required to start)
Bachelor’s degree in science with 8+ years of relative experience; 6+ years of relative experience with a Master's; or 4 additional years of relative experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.
At least 2 years of experience writing production level software for mission critical systems
At least 3 years of experience in a software team leadership role
Experience developing software products in an agile product development lifecycle
Demonstrated communication skills and visionary on business, user experience, and technical sides of product development.
Demonstrated interpersonal and problem resolution skills
Preferred Qualifications:
It is preferred that a given candidate have some combination of the following attributes:
Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or similar
Prior completed Counterintelligence Polygraph (CI-Poly)
Knowledge of principles of Data Management, Event Driven Architectures, and Microservices
Experience in a Chief Product Owner (or similar) role leading a team of Product Owners
Experience developing software products in an agile product development lifecycle in a Scaled Agile framework with Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Release Train Engineer (or Chief Scrum Master) and multiple Agile Scrum teams
Prior engineering or development experience with the Space Industry
Experience sharing knowledge, mentoring, and working in a collaborative environment
Product owner certification or any other major Agile certification
Experience with Atlassian tool suite (Jira and Confluence)
Ability to travel (limited, up to 10%)