Senior Systems Software Engineer
HybridAustin, Texas, United States
Job Summary
Debug and resolve cross-system issues spanning software, real-time messaging, networking, RF, and hardware, owning investigations even when root causes lie outside your primary depth. Pinpoint performance and latency issues in the messaging fabric and gateway supporting multi-agent coordination, while performing hands-on hardware diagnostics with bench tools to isolate boundary problems. Write and maintain software stacks under a systems architect's supervision for work outside Core Engineering sub-teams, and contribute to System Health by characterizing baselines, analyzing crashes, and producing verification evidence for release decisions. Investigate system behavior under degraded or contested link conditions and build observability into components to accelerate future debugging. Support integration tooling, CI/CD, and automated regression in SIL/HIL environments, translating field requirements into system constraints for architects to build against.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
- significant time debugging distributed, real-time, or multi-service systems in production
- Strong proficiency in C++ and/or Python
- ability to write production-quality software with architect-level supervision on system design
- Experience with real-time or low-latency messaging/middleware (e.g., DDS, ROS/ROS2, ZeroMQ, MQTT, gRPC)
- Solid working knowledge of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, multicast, basic routing)
- Working familiarity — conversational depth plus basic debugging, not specialist design work — with RF/wireless concepts (link quality, interference, basic link budget reasoning)
- Comfortable using basic hardware bench tools (multimeter, oscilloscope) to debug at the hardware/software boundary
- Demonstrated ability to debug across layers — application, network, RF, and hardware-adjacent — and to know when to pull in a specialist versus solve it directly
- Experience with Linux systems and command-line debugging tooling
- U.S. Citizenship with the ability to obtain a security clearance
Desired Qualifications
- Experience operating or debugging systems in contested/denied conditions (jamming, intermittent links, degraded bandwidth)
- Experience with Linux-based or real-time systems in resource-constrained, embedded, or edge environments (embedded Linux, bare-metal, RTOS)
- Familiarity with containerization for edge deployment (Docker/K8s) and observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, or similar)
- Experience with simulation, HIL/SIL pipelines, or sim-to-field validation workflows
- Familiarity with security considerations in tactical comms or cross-domain solutions
- Prior work in defense, aerospace, or other mission-critical/regulated environments
- Experience authoring ICDs, requirements traceability, or MBSE artifacts
- Exposure to tactical radios, MANET, or mesh networking in a support/integration capacity
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