Systems Engineer

About us

One team. Global challenges. Infinite opportunities. At Viasat, we’re on a mission to deliver connections with the capacity to change the world. For more than 35 years, Viasat has helped shape how consumers, businesses, governments and militaries around the globe communicate. We’re looking for people who think big, act fearlessly, and create an inclusive environment that drives positive impact to join our team.

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.

You will work closely with software engineers, hardware engineers, Dev Ops, product management, and airline customer teams, bridging disciplines that typically operate in isolation.

This is a site‑based role, employees work 3+ days (60%+) per week from a Viasat office or work location within a standard five‑day workweek.

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, not just validating code.
• Manage configuration and variant management for different airline customers, aircraft platforms, and hardware generations, ensuring specific customer differences are well controlled.
• Establish release‑readiness criteria and engineering quality gates with clear evidence, introducing lightweight governance to improve delivery quality while maintaining Agile practices.
• Develop engineering metrics to assess product health — such as incident recurrence, configuration complexity, traceability coverage, and release predictability — rather than focusing solely on delivery metrics.

Cross‑Team Engineering Integration

• Advocate for a system‑level approach among engineering disciplines by ensuring that software, hardware, and operational constraints are considered collectively instead of in isolation.
• Drive engineering strategies to support multiple hardware generations - taking into account CPU, storage, and memory limitations - while balancing platform capabilities with customer commitments and long‑term maintenance.
• Continuously identify architectural weaknesses, operational complexities, and engineering bottlenecks, prioritizing the platform's long‑term health alongside new feature delivery.

Hands‑On Platform Engineering

• Earn the hands‑on technical authority on system‑level issues within our embedded Linux platform operating on two generations of edge servers, scrutinizing architecture, software design decisions, and hardware constraints firsthand.
• Lead in‑depth investigations into the most complex field issues, including long‑standing unresolved failures, by instrumenting running systems to ensure that these investigations conclude effectively.
• Promote engineering improvements post‑incident that eliminate classes of failures, not individual defects, and create post‑mortems focused on preventing future occurrences instead of implementing stopgap solutions
• Transform repetitive manual interventions into automated detection and self‑healing processes, mitigating operational burdens and reducing customer escalations
• Enhance diagnostic skills across teams through mentorship, architecture‑focused code reviews, and streamlined technical standards to ensure critical knowledge is distributed rather than held by a select…