Staff Systems Engineer

Viasat, Inc. • Carlsbad, CA

2d • Onsite

About The Position

The Access Edge Platform team builds and operates the Wi-Fi and content experience used by passengers on the world's leading airlines. As a Staff Systems Engineer, you will own the engineering integrity of the platform across its full lifecycle - from requirements and architecture through implementation, verification, release, and field operation. Your work directly determines whether passengers stay connected and entertained at 35,000 feet. You will work closely with software engineers, hardware engineers, DevOps, product management, and airline customer teams, bridging disciplines that typically operate in isolation. This is a site‑based role, employees work 3+ days (60%+) per week from a Viasat office or work location within a standard five‑day workweek.

Requirements

• Master's or Bachelor's degree in Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience
• 15+ years of hands-on systems software engineering, with demonstrated Staff-level scope: architectural ownership, cross-team influence, and resolution of production incidents at the root-cause level
• Ability to rapidly understand complex platform technologies and become the technical owner of system-level problems across software, infrastructure, and embedded hardware - our current platform spans embedded Linux, distributed storage, Kubernetes-based workloads, wireless and authentication infrastructure, and low-level hardware interfaces
• Practical grounding in systems engineering discipline - requirements traceability, verification and validation, configuration management, and change impact analysis - applied pragmatically in fast-moving Agile product teams rather than as a heavyweight process
• Proven ability to instrument and analyze running distributed systems to close long-open field investigations at true root cause
• Experience defining verification strategy and test infrastructure for systems where hardware, software, and operational behavior interact - including hardware-in-the-loop or integration test environments
• Track record of reducing operational toil by converting repeated manual intervention into automated, self-healing systems
• Strong analytical skills - ability to read and reason about complex existing codebases and drive changes that reduce fragility
• Ability to communicate engineering risk, readiness, and trade-offs clearly to both technical teams and leadership

Nice To Haves

• Ability to navigate ambiguity while making the progress
• Instinct for finding patterns across unrelated incidents
• Architectural decisions to identify structural weaknesses
• Relentless focus on raising the system quality bar

Responsibilities

• Conduct system-level impact analyses for architectural and customer-specific changes before implementation.
• Own traceability across Product, Architecture, Development, Testing, and Release to ensure testing aligns with original intent, not just validating code.
• Manage configuration and variant management for different airline customers, aircraft platforms, and hardware generations, ensuring specific customer differences are well controlled.
• Establish release-readiness criteria and engineering quality gates with clear evidence, introducing lightweight governance to improve delivery quality while maintaining Agile practices.
• Develop engineering metrics to assess product health — such as incident recurrence, configuration complexity, traceability coverage, and release predictability — rather than focusing solely on delivery metrics.
• Advocate for a system-level approach among engineering disciplines by ensuring that software, hardware, and operational constraints are considered collectively instead of in isolation.
• Drive engineering strategies to support multiple hardware generations - taking into account CPU, storage, and memory limitations - while balancing platform capabilities with customer commitments and long-term maintenance.
• Continuously identify architectural weaknesses, operational complexities, and engineering bottlenecks, prioritizing the platform's long-term health alongside new feature delivery.
• Earn the hands-on technical authority on system-level issues within our embedded Linux platform operating on two generations of edge servers, scrutinizing architecture, software design decisions, and hardware constraints firsthand.
• Lead in-depth investigations into the most complex field issues, including long-standing unresolved failures, by instrumenting running systems to ensure that these investigations conclude effectively.
• Promote engineering improvements post-incident that eliminate classes of failures, not individual defects, and create post-mortems focused on preventing future occurrences instead of implementing stopgap solutions.
• Transform repetitive manual interventions into automated detection and self-healing processes, mitigating operational burdens and reducing customer escalations.
• Enhance diagnostic skills across teams through mentorship, architecture-focused code reviews, and streamlined technical standards to ensure critical knowledge is distributed rather than held by a select few.
• Define the engineering verification strategy across unit, integration, hardware-in-the-loop, and field validation — including test infrastructure that catches failure modes simulators do not model.
• Drive ground-side observability of fleet health so pre-failure signals surface before the system goes dark, and engineering decisions are based on data rather than opinion.
• Ensure CI/CD and deployment pipelines are resilient to infrastructure events, and that deployment models prevent configuration drift across a large installed base of simultaneously active software versions.

Benefits

• range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the position offered
• comprehensive benefit offerings that are focused on your holistic health and wellness

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree