Staff Systems Engineer

Quick Facts

• Staff Systems Engineer responsible for engineering integrity of an edge connectivity and content platform across its full lifecycle
• Site-based role: employees work 3+ days (60%+) per week from a Viasat office or work location within a standard five-day workweek

Description

The Access Edge Platform team builds and operates the Wi-Fi and content experience used by passengers on the world’s leading airlines. As a Staff Systems Engineer, you will own the engineering integrity of the platform across its full lifecycle—from requirements and architecture through implementation, verification, release, and field operation. Your work directly determines whether passengers stay connected and entertained at 35,000 feet, while working closely with software engineers, hardware engineers, DevOps, product management, and airline customer teams.

Responsibilities

Systems Engineering and Lifecycle Management

• Conduct system-level impact analyses for architectural and customer-specific changes before implementation
• Own traceability across Product, Architecture, Development, Testing, and Release to ensure testing aligns with original intent
• Manage configuration and variant management for different airline customers, aircraft platforms, and hardware generations
• Establish release-readiness criteria and engineering quality gates with clear evidence, while maintaining Agile practices
• Develop engineering metrics to assess product health (incident recurrence, configuration complexity, traceability coverage, release predictability)

Cross-Team Engineering Integration

• Advocate for a system-level approach among engineering disciplines by considering software, hardware, and operational constraints together
• Drive engineering strategies for multiple hardware generations, accounting for CPU, storage, and memory limitations
• Continuously identify architectural weaknesses, operational complexities, and engineering bottlenecks

Hands-On Platform Engineering

• Provide hands-on technical authority on system-level issues within an embedded Linux platform operating on two generations of edge servers
• Lead in-depth investigations into complex field issues by instrumenting running systems to reach root cause
• Promote engineering improvements post-incident to eliminate classes of failures and prevent recurrence
• Automate repetitive manual interventions into detection and self-healing processes
• Enhance diagnostic skills across teams through mentorship, architecture-focused code reviews, and technical standards

Verification and Observability

• Define verification strategy across unit, integration, hardware-in-the-loop, and field validation
• Drive ground-side observability of fleet health so pre-failure signals surface before the system goes dark
• Ensure CI/CD and deployment pipelines are resilient to infrastructure events and prevent configuration drift across a large installed base

Requirements

• Master's or Bachelor's degree in Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience
• 15+ years of hands-on systems software engineering with demonstrated Staff-level scope (architectural ownership, cross-team influence, root-cause incident resolution)
• Ability to rapidly understand complex platform technologies and own system-level problems across software, infrastructure, and embedded hardware
• Practical grounding in systems engineering (requirements traceability, verification and validation, configuration management, change impact analysis) applied in fast-moving Agile environments
• Proven ability to instrument and analyze running distributed systems to close long-open field investigations at true root cause
• Experience defining verification strategy and test infrastructure for systems where hardware, software, and operational behavior interact (including hardware-in-the-loop or integration test environments)
• Track record of reducing operational toil by converting repeated manual intervention into automated, self-healing systems
• Strong analytical skills to read and reason about complex existing codebases and reduce fragility
• Ability to communicate engineering risk, readiness, and trade-offs clearly to technical teams and leadership

Benefits

• Salary range: $180,500.00 - $285,000.00 annually; for specific work locations within San Jose, the San Francisco Bay area, and New York City metropolitan area, base pay range is $224,500.00 - $336,500.00 annually
• Additional cash or stock incentives may be provided
• Range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits depending on the position offered