Senior Systems Engineer (Satellite Ground Systems)

Location: Aurora, Colorado, United States, or Sterling, Virginia, United States

Salary: $160,000–$225,000 USD per year

Company

hirify.global delivers mission and technical expertise for national security, defense, and advanced technology challenges.

What you will do

• Translate customer mission needs, operational concepts, and multi-segment interfaces into ICDs, operational sequence diagrams, data schemas, and verifiable requirements.
• Architect and govern behavioral and structural SysML models, maintaining consistency and bidirectional traceability to software user stories.
• Work with Agile Scrum teams to decompose capabilities into technical acceptance criteria and software backlogs.
• Define and govern ground-to-space and ground-to-ground messaging schemas and protocols, including REST, HTTP, Protobuf, JSON, and publish/subscribe patterns.
• Lead verification and validation strategy, automated test-plan reviews, verification matrices, integration anomaly resolution, and formal requirements sell-off.
• Lead technical exchange meetings, interface control working groups, engineering review boards, milestone reviews, and customer demonstrations.

Requirements

• Active or current Top Secret clearance with SCI access and polygraph is required.
• Bachelor’s degree in a STEM field with 15+ years of relevant engineering experience, or a master’s degree with 13+ years.
• Proven experience delivering space-ground architectures, Command and Control, and mission management solutions across the full lifecycle.
• Expertise building and managing behavioral and structural models with MBSE tools.
• Deep experience with interface protocols and data contracts for distributed software architectures, including RESTful APIs, event streaming, message brokers, and microservice data models.
• Experience applying systems engineering in scaled Agile/Scrum environments and using Jira and Confluence for backlog decomposition and technical traceability.

Nice to have

• Experience with cloud-native, containerized environments using Kubernetes and Docker.
• Familiarity with automated integration testing using Playwright, PyTest, or automated API test suites.
• Experience with space-vehicle subsystem interactions, including telemetry, commanding, orbit dynamics, or payload operations.
• Experience coordinating architecture across multi-vendor or geographically distributed engineering teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Health Savings Account with company contribution.
• Paid time off, paid holidays, and paid parental leave.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Training and development opportunities, award programs, and company-sponsored events.
• Focus on employee well-being, professional growth, and work-life balance.