Senior Systems Engineer (Warfighter Systems)

Bellevue · Costa Mesa · Bellevue, WA (BEL-01) · Costa Mesa, CA (OC-00) · USD 166,000-220,000 · 8+ years experience · Full-time · Posted Sep 25, 2026

At a glance

Experience: 8+ years experience
Employment: Full-time
Location: Bellevue · Costa Mesa · Bellevue, WA (BEL-01) · Costa Mesa, CA (OC-00)
Salary: USD 166,000-220,000 · Base salary

We are seeking a strong and talented Senior Systems Engineer to manage the design and integration of complex systems, ensuring they meet requirements and specifications.
You will lead the technical engagements that bring new partners onto the platform: conducting technical exchanges with their engineering teams, establishing the integration design, decomposing the resulting requirements into engineering work, and authoring the reference material other teams build from.

Lead partner engagements end to end; Conduct the technical exchange, own the integration design, and drive open items to written resolution across both organizations.
Design across organizational boundaries; Own the problems that span several engineering teams and more than one company, where no single team owns the answer.
Establish reusable patterns; Convert what recurs across engagements into reference architectures, decision guidance, and integration documentation, and define the standard other teams document to.
Own the intake process; Translate partner and field needs into scoped, prioritized engineering work, and return a documented decision on each request.

Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
8+ years in systems engineering, solutions architecture, integration engineering, technical program management, forward-deployed engineering , model based system engineering or systems modeling language.
Experience as the technical lead to an external engineering team, or as the owner of a developer-facing platform surface with external or internal customers.
Demonstrated ability to conduct a technical working session, hold a substantive technical position within it, document the resulting decisions, and track outstanding commitments on both sides.
Reference architectures and integration guides an engineer can follow to completion. A writing sample is required.
Demonstrated ability to convey the same technical decision to a partner's engineering team and to a senior military stakeholder.
Eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance

DoD delivery experience: accreditation and authorization processes, multiple classification enclaves, and operation in disconnected or bandwidth-constrained environments.
Co-development experience with a defense prime, systems integrator, or defense technology company on a jointly delivered capability.
Developer experience work: documentation as a product, SDKs, developer portals, onboarding automation.
Domain fluency in command and control, geospatial systems, data fabrics, tactical networking, or sensor-to-effector integration.
Architecture judgment in API- and service-based systems: Demonstrated ability to design and critique a REST or gRPC integration, an authentication flow (OIDC, service credentials, secretless), a schema or data contract, and an event stream.