Principal Program Manager, Engineering Operations

Vantor • Westminster, CO

4d

About The Position

Vantor is seeking a Principal Engineer with deep systems engineering expertise to lead the design and delivery of complex software-intensive systems. This role involves spanning cloud platforms, distributed systems, AI-enabled products, mission software, and large-scale operational environments. It is a senior technical leadership position for individuals who excel in ambiguous situations, solve problems that cross organizational and technical boundaries, and bring clarity to highly complex systems. The successful candidate will collaborate with engineering, product, and architecture leaders to define system behavior, establish technical direction, and ensure the software built is scalable, resilient, and aligned with customer and mission outcomes. This role requires a balance of engineering rigor and product velocity, aiming to accelerate team progress by simplifying complexity, identifying risks early, and creating architectures that enable independent teams to deliver cohesive systems. The position also emphasizes the role of AI in evolving systems engineering practices to increase the speed, consistency, and reach of system architecture, analysis, and design, while identifying and mitigating risks earlier.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience solving complex software systems problems.
• Significant experience architecting and delivering large-scale, software-intensive systems.
• Demonstrated success leading major cross-functional or cross-domain technical initiatives.
• Deep understanding of modern software architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience leading architecture reviews, technical trade studies, and consequential design decisions.
• Experience defining system boundaries, interfaces, integration strategies, and validation approaches.
• Strong understanding of software development, integration, deployment, and operational readiness.
• Ability to communicate effectively with software engineers, architects, product leaders, customers, senior leaders, and executives.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence and create alignment across multiple teams.
• Systems Thinking: Naturally reason across systems, interfaces, constraints, dependencies, feedback loops, failure modes, and emergent behavior. Understand how software, infrastructure, data, operations, and customer workflows interact, and bring structure to problems that are initially unclear.
• Software Architecture: Significant experience designing and evolving large software systems. Understand distributed systems, APIs, cloud-native architectures, event-driven systems, data flows, scalability, resiliency, observability, security, and operational concerns. Know how to establish clear system boundaries, reduce unnecessary coupling, and create architectures that support both near-term delivery and long-term adaptability.
• Technical Leadership: Influence through technical judgment and credibility. Led major initiatives involving multiple teams and can build alignment across engineering, product, operations, and leadership without relying on organizational authority. Comfortable making difficult tradeoffs across customer outcomes, technical risk, delivery schedule, cost, maintainability, and strategic flexibility. Experience applying AI, automation, and agentic workflows to define and scale engineering standards, templates, playbooks, governance, and SDLC practices, with strong judgment about where human oversight remains necessary.
• Learning Agility: Ability to enter unfamiliar technical or mission domains, identify governing issues, develop sufficient depth to make sound decisions, and integrate the perspectives of subject-matter experts. Able to challenge assumptions, resolve technical disagreement, and make cross-domain decisions where no single expert has the complete picture.
• Product and Mission Orientation: Understand that successful engineering is not complete when code is written. Remain accountable for integration, validation, operational readiness, adoption, and the real-world performance of the delivered system.
• Must be a U.S. Person, defined as a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, Asylee, or Refugee.

Nice To Haves

• Cloud-native platforms and Kubernetes.
• Distributed data systems and event-driven architectures.
• AI-assisted software development and agentic engineering workflows.
• High-availability, mission-critical, or operational software platforms.
• Geospatial, aerospace, defense, robotics, autonomous systems, or other complex mission domains.
• Systems-of-systems integration.
• Developer platforms, platform engineering, or internal engineering infrastructure.
• Sovereign, on-premises, disconnected, or hybrid deployment environments.
• Model-based or digitally enabled systems engineering practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and delivery of complex, cross-domain software systems.
• Define system architecture, integration strategy, and technical direction across multiple engineering teams.
• Translate ambiguous customer, mission, and business problems into scalable technical solutions.
• Lead architecture trade studies and make consequential technical decisions across competing priorities.
• Drive system decomposition, interface definition, dependency management, and integration planning for large distributed systems.
• Partner with Product to validate customer needs and ensure delivered capabilities solve the right problems.
• Identify architectural, integration, operational, and delivery risks early and drive mitigation before they become execution problems.
• Shape technical direction across a product portfolio or strategic technical domain.
• Influence engineering organizations through technical credibility rather than reporting authority.
• Raise engineering quality through better architecture, engineering practices, technical standards, and mentoring of senior technical leaders.
• Drive capabilities from concept through integration, validation, operational readiness, and customer adoption.
• Accelerate system architecture, analysis, and design using AI.
• Identify architectural, integration, and operational risks earlier.
• Scale systems engineering practices to match the speed of AI-enabled software development.

Benefits

• Robust 401(k) with company match
• Mental health resources
• Student loan repayment assistance
• Adoption reimbursement
• Pet insurance
• Incentive eligible with a target based on contribution, company performance, and/or individual results achieved

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal