This story appears in the June 2026 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
Most people, if challenged to name the largest employer of software engineers in Utah, would visualize the trip through the Sandy to Provo tech corridor, ticking off the familiar names along the way: Lucid, BambooHR, Entrata, Adobe, Weave, Domo, Qualtrics and many more. Not only would most people be wrong, they wouldn’t even be in the right county.
That’s because the largest employer of software developers in Utah is Hill Air Force Base, with roughly 1,650 coders assigned to the 309th Software Engineering Group (SWEG).
It is a Silicon Slopes story hiding in plain sight.
When the F-16 Fighting Falcon entered service in January 1979, its designers measured superiority in miles per hour. The jet’s top speed was Mach 2.0 — about 1,500 mph — and the philosophy was simple: make the airframe light, the engine enormous and the result would be a weapon that flew and turned so fast that physics itself was its primary defense.
The aircraft replacing the F-16 at Hill Air Force Base, the F-35 Lightning II, maxes out at Mach 1.6. By the old definition, it’s slower. But now that it’s in production, the engineers who ensure the F-35 maintains its advantage don’t work in a wind tunnel. They work in the 20 buildings that make up Hill’s software campus.
When code becomes the weapon
Chad Harper, the 309th SWEG group director, and Enos Cummings, the group’s engineering branch director, have spent their careers watching this modern speed paradigm shift unfold. When the two started at Hill, military software development looked the way most people would expect it to — rigid and slow. Their teams adhered to the antiquated waterfall project management philosophy, methodically moving through the strictly enforced sequence of design, code, test, repeat.
“A software update for the F-16 would take several years. When the warfighters finally got the new capabilities, by then things had changed and it was almost too late,” Harper says. “So we asked: How can we design, code and iterate faster?”
The turning point came eight years ago, when the 309th made the pivot to Agile software development. That move meant more than just adopting a buzzword.
“We couldn’t do it in a silo. We had to involve the flight test community so they could ingest our software changes faster. We had to involve the program offices to change the way they did business. We did that transformation right, so that didn’t happen overnight. But now we can do yearly software releases with quarterly updates,” Harper says. “We led the way in the development of some Air Force applications, and we got a lot of recognition for the way we lean into areas like that. Now we’re updating some systems every two weeks.”
“The F-35 is a force multiplier. When you’re in the battle space, this jet’s the quarterback of the fight. It has phenomenal sensors that all get integrated into one screen so that the pilot can look down quickly, sift through the information and make decisions very rapidly."
— Maj. Sean “Rambo” Loughlin
Harper says the goal is to replace Agile with something even faster: automated build pipelines powered by continuous integration and development. That’s a cadence much of private industry can’t match, not to mention the much greater consequences if something goes wrong.
To raise the stakes even higher, on fifth-generation fighters like the F-35 and F-22, software is less a support function than a weapons system, because the weapon is data.
When the fourth-generation F-16 rolled off the line, roughly 45% of its functions were controlled by about 200,000 lines of code. The F-35 is closer to 90% software controlled, running on nine million lines of code. The jet’s real advantage is what that software does with the information gathered by its sensors and shared across the battlespace over Link 16, the military’s high-speed, jam-resistant data network sometimes called the “fighter-jet internet.”
Maj. Sean “Rambo” Loughlin, an F-35 pilot stationed at Hill, explains it this way: “The F-35 is a force multiplier. When you’re in the battle space, this jet’s the quarterback of the fight. It has phenomenal sensors that all get integrated into one screen so that the pilot can look down quickly, sift through the information and make decisions very rapidly. It’s able to take in a lot of things that an F-16 cannot, but we can pass it out to them and other airframes on Link 16.”
Better data delivered on the fly
The software updating process begins with the people closest to the hardware. Pilots and maintainers surface problems and opportunities, and small teams of developers respond with modular software that can be tested, security-reviewed and deployed without taking the underlying system offline. To be certain the developers have a perfect understanding of how their updates will be used, the 309th has teams of retired pilots on staff as subject-matter experts.
So, how fast do these update cycles get? Pretty fast.
To prove the concept, in 2021, a software update was transmitted to a training jet, mid-supersonic flight, mediated by the open-source Kubernetes framework. At the time, Capt. Trevor Breau said, “Kubernetes enables rapid software development on the order of weeks instead of years. The faster turnaround time allows software developers to rapidly respond to user feedback and dynamic threats.”
In a world where updates require most people to reboot their computer, the Air Force has found a way for a jet to land with more advanced software than it had at takeoff — no Ctrl+Alt+Delete needed.
“Our team was integral to making that success. By proving that on a [T-38] legacy system, it’s something we can now integrate into others,” Cummings says.
The group later ran a similar proof of concept on the F-16, updating a mission data file in-flight so the aircraft could recognize a threat it previously couldn’t.
Of course, AI has the opportunity to accelerate updates and enhance capabilities, but with cybersecurity threats looming around every corner, the 309th must proceed with serious caution. While the software teams are leveraging AI now, leadership is determined to find secure solutions that keep the 309th’s tech competitive internationally.
Three bases, one software machine
The 309th is one of three primary legs of the Air Force Sustainment Center (AFSC) Software Directorate, a distributed system that functions as the U.S. Air Force’s in-house software factory for some of its most complex platforms, serving programs throughout the country. The 76th Software Engineering Group at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma and the 402nd Software Engineering Group at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia make up the other two legs as sister organizations.
Together, the three groups — with additional smaller engineering groups supporting specific missions — employ about 5,500 software engineers nationwide.
“Here at Hill, we [create software] for the fighters. At Tinker, they do more of the software support for bombers,” Harper says. “At Robins, they do it for the heavies — C-5, C-17, C-130.”
Once siloed, the software groups were linked together more tightly through the directorate in 2023 to further prioritize the Air Force’s software needs.
Air Force accounting does not view the 309th as a traditional cost center. Instead, it’s viewed as one of several internal enterprises paid by the units it develops software for. In that sense, the 309th is said to generate revenue. One advantage of this approach is having a budget free of congressional oversight. Turns out, the 309th generates a lot of revenue. During the 2025 fiscal year alone, Hill’s team generated approximately $500 million of the software directorate’s $1.4 billion.
Mission vs. market
Over the past 15 years, there has been no shortage of software jobs in Utah, which makes staffing a large government-led software team a challenge. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, software jobs are projected to grow 15% through 2034, which suggests AI’s impact on software engineering may not be as grim as expected, which means the demand on base will only grow.
Interns flock to the base every year, thanks to the 309th’s tight relationships with Utah State University, Weber State University, Brigham Young University and the University of Utah. But retaining engineers beyond the seven- to nine-year mark is a tall hurdle, especially in Utah’s competitive SaaS landscape.
“We do very well recruiting, but … working for the government [is] not as competitive with pay, so [with interns], we do a lot of seeding for the local economy in terms of Silicon Slopes and these tech industries,” Harper says, “ … but once [journeymen] have a few years under their belts, they’re looking for more salary opportunities.”
The 309th’s educational partnerships have been fruitful for both the base’s programs and the students, with many collaborations culminating in capstone and senior projects that give students hands-on experience solving real military challenges. The rigor required to execute these projects offers a sturdy career foundation that can be applied at any company.
“This might be a long leash, but I’m going to say it anyway. Maybe we’ve contributed to the tech boom that’s happened within Utah. … I mean, we’re not saying we’re the reason … but we helped seed in some of the [talent]. I think we’ve aided … and it has benefitted us as well.”
So what has kept Harper on base for 20 years? Or Cummings for 35 years? One word: mission. They take immense pride in interacting with pilots and supporting warfighters, knowing their work is imperative to mission readiness and national defense.
That is what keeps many of Hill’s software engineers, and Air Force engineers across the country, in place — not just the systems they build, but the people those systems are built to protect. They know that outcomes in contested airspace may hinge, in part, on lines of code written thousands of miles away by teams of developers straddling Davis and Weber counties.
In an era when military advantage is increasingly defined by information, connectivity and decision-making speed, software has become as critical to air superiority as engines, wings or weapons. The evolution from the F-16 to the F-35 reflects that reality. The F-16 dominated a generation of warfare because it was built for an age when victory belonged to the fastest-moving. The F-35 was built for an age when victory belongs to the fastest-thinking.