Senior Engineering Manager, Systems

About the role

The Systems Engineering Manager is responsible for building and running the team responsible for NODA's system-level integrity as we scale. This role requires the ability to grow the bench from where it is today into the multi-pod team NODA needs, while defining how Systems Engineering operates along the way.

Key Responsibilities

• Hire, level, and develop engineers across software, networking, RF, and hardware-adjacent debugging to build the bench NODA needs as headcount scales
• Coach cross-layer debugging as a team capability, teaching engineers when to go deep in one domain, when to go wide across several, and when to delegate
• Personally profile systems and root-cause the issues too ambiguous or too cross-cutting for anyone else to cleanly own
• Own System Health for your scope, including performance and stability KPIs, MTTR on cross-system issues, degradation detection, and the tooling and telemetry that makes it possible
• Treat security and CMMC-derived constraints as first-class design inputs, not a parallel compliance track
• Catch the gaps other teams leave, deliberately or inadvertently, before they surface as integration failures or field incidents
• Translate field, customer, and BD requirements into constraints your team can build against
• Represent Systems Engineering at cross-team design sessions and the Architecture Review Board, and escalate system integrity and delivery risk per the Systems Engineering charter

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience, with substantial hands-on time debugging distributed, real-time, or multi-domain systems in production
• 2+ years managing engineers, ideally across more than one technical domain
• A real track record as an expert debugger, the person teams bring the hardest, most ambiguous cross-system issues to, regardless of layer
• Able to think both ways: horizontal breadth across software, RF, networking, firmware, and hardware, and vertical depth to root-cause a single hard failure all the way down when breadth alone won't solve it
• Experience owning system health, performance monitoring, or release-readiness processes
• Working knowledge of networking fundamentals and real-time or low-latency middleware
• Comfortable with hardware bench diagnostics (multimeter, oscilloscope) and reading firmware-level behavior well enough to know when to loop in a specialist
• Working understanding of DoD security and compliance frameworks (e.g. CMMC) as they apply to system design, or demonstrated ability to ramp fast
• U.S. Citizenship with the ability to obtain a security clearance

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience scaling a cross-domain engineering team 2x+ in under a year
• Experience in defense, aerospace, or other mission-critical or regulated environments
• Direct CMMC Level 2 (or similar) experience in a systems engineering context
• Experience with embedded and edge-constrained systems (embedded Linux, RTOS, bare-metal)
• Familiarity with SIL and HIL pipelines and sim-to-field validation
• Experience authoring or overseeing ICDs, requirements traceability, or MBSE artifacts

Skills & Attributes

• Systems thinker comfortable operating across software, networking, RF, firmware, and hardware boundaries
• Strong debugger and root-cause analyst, with the discipline to trace hard failures across layers rather than stopping at the first plausible symptom
• Effective team-builder and coach, capable of teaching cross-domain judgment as a repeatable team capability
• Detail-oriented approach to system reliability, security, and release readiness in mission-critical applications
• Collaborative mindset with the ability to work effectively across engineering, autonomy, and integration teams
• Bias for action, with the judgment to escalate cross-team gaps with clear options rather than just problems
• Mission driven, with a personal commitment to supporting the nation's defense