Senior Engineering Manager, Systems

About the role

You will build and run the systems engineering function that keeps NODA's platform coherent as it scales across products, partners, and deployment environments. You will personally profile systems and debug cross-domain issues that no other team can cleanly own, while establishing how systems engineering operates end to end. This role owns the seams where unhanded integrations, gaps from other teams, and untraced end-to-end paths can break orchestration in the field. You will think vertically enough to root-cause a single hard failure all the way down, and horizontally enough to see how a fix in one domain breaks another. Success requires growing the bench from its current state into the multi-pod team NODA needs while defining the discipline of systems engineering along the way. You will treat security and CMMC-derived constraints as first-class design inputs, not a parallel compliance track that arrives late. The role exists to ensure that system integrity becomes a deliberate, measurable property rather than an occasional outcome.

Key facts

What you'll do

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.

Own crash-to-root-cause analysis and the verification evidence behind release go/no-go calls.

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.

Define and evolve the career ladder and skill framework for systems engineers, including how specialization and generalization balance across the bench.

Establish the observability, testability, and evidence standards that allow cross-domain issues to be resolved quickly and reliably.

Drive the selection and integration of telemetry, instrumentation, and diagnostic tooling that exposes cross-domain interactions in production and field exercises.

Own the systems engineering portion of release readiness, including verification evidence, rollback criteria, and post-incident reviews.

Build playbooks and runbooks that make cross-domain debugging repeatable and teachable as the organization scales.

Requirements

You bring 8+ years of engineering experience, with substantial hands-on time debugging distributed, real-time, or multi-domain systems in production.

You have 2+ years managing engineers, ideally across more than one technical domain, and you know how to level people and calibrate career growth.

You maintain a real track record as an expert debugger, the person teams bring the hardest, most ambiguous cross-system issues to, regardless of layer.

You can 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.

You have experience owning system health, performance monitoring, or release-readiness processes and shaping them into scalable practices.

You possess working knowledge of networking fundamentals and real-time or low-latency middleware and how failures manifest across these layers.

You are comfortable with hardware bench diagnostics (multimeter, oscilloscope) and reading firmware-level behavior well enough to know when to loop in a specialist.

You have a working understanding of DoD security and compliance frameworks (e.g. CMMC) as they apply to system design, or demonstrated ability to ramp fast on these constraints.

You are a U.S. Citizen with the ability to obtain a security clearance.

Nice to have

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.

Practical notes

Location: Austin, TX (Hybrid on-site, with approximately 20% typical travel, and up to 40% during field exercises and major integration events).

Clearance Requirement: U.S. Citizen with the ability to obtain a security clearance.

Engagement: Full-time

Reports to: Head of Engineering (interim Systems Engineering lead)