Senior Engineering Manager, Systems

NODA AI•Austin, TX

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

NODA is a veteran-owned, venture-backed technology company that is transforming how unmanned systems collaborate in complex, mission-critical environments. We are developing next-generation solutions that enable the autonomous orchestration of heterogeneous unmanned systems across air, sea, land, and space with vital applications in the defense, intelligence, and commercial sectors. NODA is a systems integration company at its core. We exist to make heterogeneous unmanned systems work together, and Systems Engineering is where that promise either holds or breaks. As NODA scales across products, partners, and deployment environments, keeping the system coherent in practice, not just on paper, is what separates a platform that works in the field from one that only works in a demo. Joining NODA means working on meaningful technology that pushes the boundaries of autonomy alongside a team that thrives on innovation, rapid iteration, and collaboration. We are seeking a Systems Engineering Manager to build and run the team responsible for NODA's system-level integrity as we scale. This is a high-ownership, still-technical manager role. You will personally profile systems, debug the cross-domain issues no one else can cleanly own, and build a team that catches what other teams miss, whether the gap was left deliberately or by accident. Your work will focus on the seams: the places where one unowned handoff, one gap left behind by another team, or one integration nobody traced end to end can break the orchestration. 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 in 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.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

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
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