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Systems Engineer Architect Verified today

Vantor · 2 Locations · Space Systems · first seen 2026-10-21
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The Role

We are looking for an Engineer with deep systems engineering expertise to lead the design and delivery of complex software-intensive systems spanning cloud platforms, distributed systems, AI-enabled products, mission software, and large-scale operational environments. This is a senior technical leadership role for engineers who thrive in ambiguity, solve problems that span organizational and technical boundaries, and bring clarity to highly complex systems.

You will partner with engineering, product, and architecture leaders to define system behavior, establish technical direction, and ensure the software we build remains scalable, resilient, and aligned with customer and mission outcomes. Success in this role requires balancing engineering rigor with product velocity.

What You'll Do

  • Lead the technical design and delivery of complex, cross-domain software systems.
  • Define system architecture, integration strategy, and technical direction across multiple engineering teams.
  • Translate ambiguous customer, mission, and business problems into scalable technical solutions.
  • Lead architecture trade studies and make consequential technical decisions across competing priorities.
  • Drive system decomposition, interface definition, dependency management, and integration planning for large distributed systems.
  • Partner with Product to validate customer needs and ensure delivered capabilities solve the right problems.
  • Identify architectural, integration, operational, and delivery risks early and drive mitigation before they become execution problems.
  • Shape technical direction across a product portfolio or strategic technical domain.
  • Influence engineering organizations through technical credibility rather than reporting authority.
  • Raise engineering quality through better architecture, engineering practices, technical standards, and mentoring of senior technical leaders.
  • Drive capabilities from concept through integration, validation, operational readiness, and customer adoption.

AI-Enabled Systems Engineering

AI-assisted development and agentic software engineering are dramatically increasing the rate at which teams can design, implement, and test software. We are looking for someone who sees AI as an opportunity to evolve how systems engineering is practiced, including accelerating system architecture and design, identifying risks earlier, and scaling systems engineering practices to match the speed of AI-enabled software development.

What We're Looking For

Systems Thinking: You naturally reason across systems, interfaces, constraints, dependencies, feedback loops, failure modes, and emergent behavior. You can understand how software, infrastructure, data, operations, and customer workflows interact.

Software Architecture: You have significant experience designing and evolving large software systems. You understand distributed systems, APIs, cloud-native architectures, event-driven systems, data flows, scalability, resiliency, observability, security, and operational concerns.

Technical Leadership: You influence through technical judgment and credibility. You have led major initiatives involving multiple teams and can build alignment across engineering, product, operations, and leadership without relying on organizational authority.

Learning Agility: You can enter unfamiliar technical or mission domains, identify the governing issues, develop sufficient depth to make sound decisions, and integrate the perspectives of subject-matter experts.

Product and Mission Orientation: You understand that successful engineering is not complete when code is written. You remain accountable for integration, validation, operational readiness, adoption, and the real-world performance of the delivered system.

Required Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience solving complex software systems problems.
  • Significant experience architecting and delivering large-scale, software-intensive systems.
  • Demonstrated success leading major cross-functional or cross-domain technical initiatives.
  • Deep understanding of modern software architecture and distributed systems.
  • Experience leading architecture reviews, technical trade studies, and consequential design decisions.
  • Experience defining system boundaries, interfaces, integration strategies, and validation approaches.
  • Strong understanding of software development, integration, deployment, and operational readiness.
  • Ability to communicate effectively with software engineers, architects, product leaders, customers, senior leaders, and executives.
  • Demonstrated ability to lead through influence and create alignment across multiple teams.

Preferred Experience

  • Cloud-native platforms and Kubernetes.
  • Distributed data systems and event-driven architectures.
  • AI-assisted software development and agentic engineering workflows.
  • High-availability, mission-critical, or operational software platforms.
  • Geospatial, aerospace, defense, robotics, autonomous systems, or other complex mission domains.
  • Systems-of-systems integration.
  • Developer platforms, platform engineering, or internal engineering infrastructure.
  • Sovereign, on-premises, disconnected, or hybrid deployment environments.
  • Model-based or digitally enabled systems engineering practices.

What Success Looks Like

  • Create clarity in highly ambiguous and complex technical environments.
  • Establish architectures that scale across products, domains, and engineering teams.
  • Anticipate technical and organizational risks before they become systemic constraints.
  • Enable teams to move faster while improving technical quality and operational confidence.
  • Ensure independent teams deliver components that function as a cohesive system.
  • Use AI to increase the speed, consistency, and reach of systems engineering.
  • Develop other senior technical leaders and improve how the organization makes technical decisions.
  • Preserve long-term architectural flexibility while delivering near-term customer and mission outcomes.

Compensation

Colorado: $122,000.00 - $162,000.00 - $178,200.00 annually

Washington, DC metropolitan area: $134,000.00 - $178,000.00 - $195,800.00 annually

For all other states, geographic cost of labor is used to develop market-driven ranges. Starting pay will be based on factors such as experience, qualifications, skills, location, and market conditions. This position is incentive eligible with a target based on contribution, company performance, and/or individual results achieved.

Eligibility

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, requiring U.S. person status as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3).