Senior Staff Software Systems Engineer Verified today

The Role

We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Systems Engineer to serve as the technical authority for a product or major product evolution. You will lead architecture, systems engineering, integration strategy, and technical execution across multiple engineering teams to ensure we deliver scalable, reliable, and operationally successful software systems.

This role bridges Product and Engineering by validating customer needs, translating them into system architecture, and guiding technical decisions throughout the product lifecycle. You will influence through technical credibility, align multiple teams around shared engineering decisions, and improve how the organization makes technical tradeoffs.

What You'll Do

• Serve as the technical authority for a product or major product evolution.
• Define system architecture and technical direction spanning multiple engineering teams.
• Partner with Product Management to validate customer needs and ensure planned capabilities solve the right customer problem.
• Lead architecture reviews, trade studies, and major technical decisions affecting product evolution.
• Drive system decomposition, interface definition, integration planning, and release sequencing.
• Balance technical, operational, lifecycle, and delivery tradeoffs across teams and releases.
• Identify and manage architectural, integration, schedule, and operational risks across the product lifecycle.
• Resolve cross-team technical conflicts and remove engineering friction.
• Establish engineering practices that improve consistency, quality, and delivery across teams.
• Mentor senior engineers and develop technical leadership throughout the organization.
• Guide products from concept through integration, validation, operational readiness, and customer deployment.

AI-Enabled Systems Engineering

AI-assisted software development increases engineering velocity and raises the importance of strong systems engineering. In this role, you will help the organization apply AI to accelerate architecture and systems analysis, identify integration and operational risks earlier, improve requirements validation and technical decision-making, and scale systems engineering practices to support AI-enabled development.

What We're Looking For

Systems Thinking: You understand complex software systems as interconnected products rather than isolated components. You reason across architecture, interfaces, dependencies, operational workflows, constraints, and emergent behavior.

Software Architecture: You have experience designing and evolving large software-intensive systems. You understand distributed systems, cloud platforms, APIs, data architecture, resiliency, observability, scalability, security, and operational readiness.

Technical Leadership: You influence through technical judgment rather than organizational authority. You build alignment across multiple teams, facilitate difficult engineering decisions, and guide organizations through ambiguity.

Customer and Product Orientation: You understand customer missions well enough to challenge assumptions, validate evolving requirements, and keep engineering effort aligned with customer outcomes.

Learning Agility: You repeatedly develop expertise in unfamiliar technical domains, synthesize input from specialists, and make sound engineering decisions across multiple disciplines.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Significant experience designing and delivering complex software-intensive systems.
• Experience serving as a technical lead across multiple engineering teams.
• Strong understanding of modern software architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience leading architecture reviews and technical trade studies.
• Experience managing system integration and cross-team technical dependencies.
• Demonstrated ability to resolve complex technical issues spanning multiple organizations.
• Excellent communication skills with engineers, product managers, customers, and senior leadership.

Preferred Experience

• Cloud-native platforms and Kubernetes.
• Event-driven and distributed architectures.
• AI-assisted software development workflows.
• Systems-of-systems engineering.
• High-availability or mission-critical software.
• Platform engineering.
• Operational readiness and production deployment.
• Model-based or digital systems engineering.

Compensation

Base pay for this position in Colorado: $128,000.00 to $187,000.00 annually, based on experience, qualifications, skills, location, and market conditions. This position is incentive eligible with a target based on contribution, company performance, and individual results achieved.

Vantor offers a competitive total rewards package including a robust 401(k) with company match, mental health resources, student loan repayment assistance, adoption reimbursement, and pet insurance.

Employment Requirements

To be eligible for this position, you must be a U.S. Person, defined as a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, Asylee, or Refugee. Certain roles may be subject to U.S. export control laws (ITAR), requiring U.S. person status as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3).