> Basically there are two entirely different paths here. For example, the person who writes all the software to drive the cockpit displays is probably called something like a "cockpit avionics engineer" and is organizationally in the department that's responsible for building such things.
I don't know how Lockheed organizes, but I assume it is similar to Raytheon. Raytheon had a matrix organization where the rows are functional groups (e.g., software engineering, digital electronics engineering, RF engineering) and the columns are program teams (e.g., radar power supply, radar antenna, radar signal processor). The title you describe would align with a program group, but your "official" title would come from your functional group (which would be software engineering in this case).
> These people can get paid very well.
In the absolute. For software engineers, it's pretty average. I was writing some pretty cutting-edge embedded signal processing software when I left Raytheon in 2012, and I was getting paid $85,000/year with 9.5 years of experience. Based on my trajectory, I would have been at around $120,000 now had I stayed. This was in Dallas, so it was good money compared to the COL, but I could have made slightly more at just about any other larg-ish employer in the area. That said, I both sucked at and hated the internal political games at Raytheon, so perhaps I could have done better if those weren't true.