Principal Systems Engineer

This is a remote position.

Principal Systems Engineer

Location: Remote, United States. Periodic travel to the client's East Coast headquarters, up to a quarter of the time.

Employment Type: Full-time, direct hire

Compensation: $140,000 to $200,000 base salary, plus benefits

Direct Reports: None (technical leadership role)

Summary

Intrepidus Talent Solutions is an aerospace and defense executive search firm. On behalf of a client that builds flight electronics for national security and civil space missions, we are recruiting a Principal Systems Engineer to lead multidisciplinary development programs from concept through delivery.

The company designs radiation-tolerant electronic systems for harsh space environments and has a track record of getting hardware qualified and on orbit. Engineering rigor is the culture: formal design and peer reviews, disciplined baselines, and development processes scaled to the size of the program rather than imported from a large prime.

What You Will Do

You will be the senior technical voice on your programs. Reporting to the head of systems engineering, you will drive the technical approach, set and defend the baseline, and make sure trade studies, analysis, and verification actually close before hardware ships. You will work alongside program managers and chief engineers as the technical point of contact for the program, including in front of customers.

• Lead engineers across electrical, mechanical, software, and firmware disciplines in developing RF, digital processing, and networking electronics for spaceflight, without formal direct reports
• Run the systems engineering process for your programs: requirements definition and flow-down, trade studies and analysis, technical baseline control, and verification and validation through qualification
• Plan and present internal and customer design reviews and serve as the program's technical representative to customers
• Contribute to internal research and development planning and new product roadmaps
• Support capture and proposal activity with technical approaches, estimates, and risk assessment
• Balance performance, cost, schedule, and risk across programs and make the calls when they conflict
• Help engineering leadership build capability across the organization through mentoring, process improvement, and hiring input

What You Bring

• A bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline (electrical, computer, or mechanical preferred) and typically 12 or more years of related experience; an advanced degree may offset some of the experience requirement
• A record of leading complex spaceflight or aerospace hardware through the full life cycle: concept, design, qualification, production, and delivery to the customer
• Deep expertise in at least one engineering domain and enough fluency in the others to resolve cross-discipline problems
• Practical command of systems engineering methods applied to real product development, not just process documentation
• The judgment to work from high-level objectives with minimal direction
• Clear written and verbal communication, including presenting technical positions to customers and executives

Nice to Have

• Master's degree in a STEM field
• Prior work on high-reliability or radiation-hardened electronics for space or similar survivability-driven applications
• Software-defined system architecture experience
• Board-level design background: schematic capture, PCB layout, high-speed digital, mixed-signal, and signal integrity analysis, with tools such as Altium, PSpice, LTspice, Keysight ADS, or SOLIDWORKS
• FPGA and embedded hardware experience, including Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ or Versal devices and VPX (VITA 46, VITA 65) form factors
• Signal processing or algorithm development
• Modeling and requirements tooling such as MBSE, MATLAB Simulink, STK, or requirements management databases
• Networking fundamentals and familiarity with the OSI model

Compensation and Benefits

Base salary is expected to fall between $140,000 and $200,000 depending on experience, skills, education, internal equity, and work location. The client provides medical, dental, and vision coverage; life, AD&D, and disability insurance; HSA and FSA options; paid time off and holidays; a 401(k) with company match; tuition reimbursement; parental and military leave; and a discretionary annual bonus for eligible positions.

About Intrepidus Talent Solutions

Intrepidus Talent Solutions recruits engineering, program, and corporate leaders for aerospace and defense companies. Our founders spent their careers leading talent acquisition at Northrop Grumman and L3Harris and bring that operator's view to every search. All applications are handled in confidence. Our client is an equal opportunity employer and considers all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status.