Principal Defence Systems Engineer

Build and lead the team that puts SkyWatch's platform inside Canada's sovereign and defence environments. We are opening an Ottawa engineering team to deliver a sovereign version of our platform: deployable in private cloud, on premises and air-gapped, accredited for government use, interoperable with defence systems, and carrying our AI agents inside the security boundary. You are its first hire and its technical owner. You own the architecture of the sovereign product line and the roadmap and delivery of the Government & Defence engineering team. You build the team from the ground up, about six engineers and two continuously staffed co-op seats over 2027, and you are the technical acceptance authority at each delivery milestone. Reporting to the CEO, you have real say over what gets built and how. That means your calls have to be good for the customer and good for SkyWatch, and what you ship has to be a pleasure to use, even inside the security boundary. This is a founding role. You will design the system, hire the people who build it and sit across the table from government technical authorities, often in the same week. Key responsibilities • Own the sovereign architecture. Deployment architecture for private-cloud, on-premises and air-gapped environments; data segregation and secure multi-tenant distribution; security design end to end. • Lead accreditation. Own the technical evidence for security assessment and authorization, including ITSG-33 controls at Protected B, with audit and logging built in rather than bolted on. • Hold a very high bar for user experience. Analysts and operators use this under time pressure, often disconnected, with security in the way. Make it simple, fast and obvious anyway. Security is never an excuse for a clumsy product. • Deliver interoperability. Tactical dissemination and defence data standards (NITF/NSIF, SIDD, GeoPackage, STANAG 4559), and integration with common operating picture, GIS and TAK environments. • Bring AI inside the boundary. Agent workflows over sovereign data with trace retention for audit, human-in-the-loop analyst workflows, and evaluation of answer quality and latency. • Run roadmap and delivery. Own the roadmap and SDLC for Government & Defence against our product direction, and act as technical acceptance authority at each milestone gate. • Make calls that are good for the customer and for SkyWatch. Know what a sovereign deployment costs to build, accredit and support, and build it once for many customers rather than once per contract wherever you can. • Build and lead the team. Hire, lead and grow the Ottawa engineers, and run a co-op mentorship programme with local universities. • Own the government support surface. The support agent, its user experience and its knowledge corpus inside the sovereign access boundary. Who you are • A systems architect for constrained environments. You have shipped software that runs where the internet does not reach and where security is audited. • Fluent in defence customers. You understand how Canadian defence and government technical authorities evaluate, accept and accredit systems. • Great taste. You care how a system feels to the analyst or operator using it, not just whether it passes accreditation, and you notice when something is almost right. • Commercially minded. You understand how government programmes are bought and what they cost us to deliver, and you make trade-offs a CEO would recognise. It needn't be your strongest suit, but you want to grow it. • A team builder. You have hired and led engineers, and you want to build a team rather than join one. • AI-first by habit. You build with LLMs and agents and you know how to make them auditable. Qualifications • 10+ years building production software, including 3+ years as a principal, architect or technical lead on secure or defence systems. • Hands-on experience with on-premises, private-cloud or air-gapped deployment, and with security assessment and authorization (ITSG-33, NIST 800-53 or equivalent). • Experience leading an engineering team through milestone-based delivery to a government customer. • Software you shaped for analysts or operators that set a high bar for usability, and that you can walk us through at an unclassified level. • Experience making build decisions with a business trade-off, such as cost to deliver, reuse across customers or time to market. • Canadian citizenship and eligibility to obtain and maintain a Government of Canada security clearance (Secret or higher). • Experience with geospatial, imagery or ISR data and defence interoperability standards. Strongly preferred • Experience deploying LLM or agent systems in regulated environments. Preferred Compensation Base salary plus stock options. Health benefits and on-site or hybrid work from Ottawa. Indicative base salary: CA$200,000 to CA$240,000, depending on experience and clearance. Why SkyWatch • A founding role. Design the system and hire the team, with a direct line to the CEO. • Mission. Sovereign access to Earth observation data for Canada and its allies. • The frontier. AI agents operating on satellite, aerial and drone data inside the security boundary.