Systems Engineer IV, PNT Product Lines

Systems Engineer IV, PNT Product Lines

Company: Defense-technology company (name shared under NDA)
Location: Northern Virginia or Las Vegas, Nevada
Type: Full-time
Compensation: $130,000 to $160,000, flexible upward for the right Virginia-based candidate
Eligibility: U.S. citizenship required

Confidential Search
· Defense Technology

Confidential search. The hiring company’s identity is shared with candidates under NDA.

A founder-led defense technology company building deployable position, navigation, and timing (PNT) hardware for the U.S. Army. The company is moving three product lines out of prototype and onto a production floor of its own in Las Vegas, with engineering based in Northern Virginia. This is a place where the work you own is the work that ships: a small team, real hardware, and fielding timelines that do not move.

You establish the systems engineering baseline for four PNT product lines: a tactical radio product, a mounted radio module, a software-defined timing and telemetry module, and a navigation sensor fusion line. Everything downstream this year sits on the requirements, interfaces, and trade studies you produce, including integration engineering, production line stand-up, and test and verification.

Today these products exist as a working prototype baseline. Your job is to turn that into an engineering baseline that a production line and a Government customer can both be held to.

• Requirements analysis. System-level functional, performance, interface, environmental, and supportability requirements for each product line, traceable to the customer’s operational needs and to applicable military standards including MIL-STD-461 and MIL-STD-810.
• The Systems Engineering Plan. Authored and delivered as a formal PWS deliverable.
• Requirements traceability. Stand up the Requirements Traceability Verification Matrix (RTVM) for each product line, with requirements allocated to design elements and defined verification methods and acceptance criteria.
• Interface Control Documents. Lead ICD development covering physical connectors, power interfaces, data exchange protocols, RF interfaces, and integration interfaces across dismounted, vehicle-mounted, and unmanned system architectures.
• Oscillator upgrade trade study. Lead the timing module technology upgrade path from a TCXO baseline to an OCXO upgrade, covering technical rationale, holdover performance projections, component availability, and the program milestone dependencies that govern the decision.
• Thermal management analysis. Characterize modem heat generation under sustained transmit power and evaluate passive cooling design options for the timing module chassis across all three deployment configurations.
• Technical direction. Provide engineering and managerial direction on problem definition, analysis, and implementation, and perform risk assessment using modeling and simulation techniques.

• 10 to 20 years of systems engineering experience on complex hardware systems. A master’s degree may be required to meet the contract labor category.
• Hands-on ownership of the full systems engineering artifact set, including requirements decomposition, ICDs, RTVM and verification matrices, and the SEP, on a program that actually shipped hardware.
• Working fluency with MIL-STD-461 and MIL-STD-810 qualification, and what those standards cost you in design.
• Embedded electronics depth across RF, power, connectors, and data interfaces. You can read a schematic and argue with a hardware engineer productively.
• Comfort operating as the single technical authority across multiple concurrent product lines, with no one above you to escalat the engineering call to.
• U.S. citizenship, and the ability to obtain and…