Senior Integrated Systems Engineer (Payload SW), STAR (System Test Automation and Regression)

About the role

The Senior Integrated Systems Engineer will lead the requirements strategy, operational excellence, and continuous improvement of nightly regression test runs for payload software. This role requires deep system-level understanding of payload software and the ability to translate that understanding into test strategy.

Responsibilities

• Develop deep expertise in payload software architecture—signal processing chains, protocol stacks, resource management, and fault handling—to define comprehensive test strategies and prioritize coverage investments.
• Lead requirements gathering across payload software engineers, systems engineers, and RF engineers, ensuring test coverage evolves ahead of the payload software roadmap.
• Own operational excellence of nightly regression runs: define SLAs for run reliability, establish escalation paths, and drive systemic improvements that eliminate recurring failure modes.
• Lead technical roadmap definition efforts for test coverage expansion and operational improvements—decide what to build, what to defer, and what to retire.
• Define and own metrics for nightly run effectiveness—pass rates, flakiness, coverage gaps, cycle time, defect escape rate—and drive accountability across contributing teams.
• Identify systemic patterns in nightly run failures and drive architectural changes (not just fixes) that prevent entire classes of issues from recurring.
• Collaborate with internal and external customers to define and implement system architectures for integrated test venues.
• Design complex test sequences that coordinate and synchronize equipment and services across multiple layers to verify function and performance of satellite hardware and software.
• Architect test plans, coverage models, and traceability frameworks that scale as payload software complexity grows.
• Influence payload software design for testability—participate in architecture reviews and advocate for interfaces, hooks, and observability that enable effective automated testing.
• Mentor engineers on the team in systems thinking, requirements definition, and operational rigor.
• Lead design reviews and cross-team technical discussions to align test strategy with program milestones.
• Drive process improvements across test environment configuration, data management, results reporting, and stakeholder communication.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or other related discipline
• Experience debugging and systems analysis to identify and quickly resolve or mitigate issues
• Experience collaborating and influencing multiple teams across multiple organizations
• 5+ years of experience in systems engineering, test engineering, or integration and test roles
• 4+ years of experience gathering, documenting, and managing technical requirements for complex systems
• 3+ years of experience driving operational improvements or process optimization for test/CI systems
• Experience working with automated test systems or CI/CD pipelines (as a user, operator, requirements owner, or architect)