About the role
The Undersea Systems Division at Leidos currently has an opening for a Senior Optical Systems Engineer. Candidate will immediately contribute to a funded Government-Industry-Lab team to establish the feasibility of an optical laser communication system in a specific configuration for communication through the air-water-interface employing underwater and airborne hosts.
Primary Responsibilities:
- Direct the architecture, development, and sustainment of mission-critical sensor recording systems across up to several concurrent projects
- Collaborate with team to identify embedded firmware and software requirements and evaluate candidate design approaches for solving wide-ranging technical problems.
- Review the current state of the recording system codebase, including any changes made since my departure, to assess what needs attention and prioritize next steps.
- Identify and resolve any existing code quality issues to establish a stable baseline for ongoing development.
- Begin setting up the recording system build in a CI pipeline to enable automated builds and reduce manual integration risk.
- Begin active development on the recording system, picking up priority tasks based on current project needs.
- Provide technical guidance to the development team on the recording system architecture and best practices.
Basic Qualifications
- U.S. Citizen with ability to obtain SECRET security clearance.
- Experience with the Leidos Pulse Propagation Model (PPM) design, legacy MATLAB codebase, and operation
- Extensive experience with optical (blue-green) transmitters and receivers, experience developing integrated transceiver payloads, and experience integrating and testing such payloads with host platforms
- Ability to read, understand, and interpret complex technical documents.
- Ability to communicate complex ideas orally and visually.
Preferred Qualifications
- 40+ years of experience in development and application of technologies, design, development, integration, test, and production of systems.
- Ideally the experience will reflect a career with increasing levels of technology and system complexity, and increasing leadership responsibility and accountability.
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:
August 17, 2026
For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.
Pay Range:
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.
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