Position Title: Principal Systems Engineer
Position Type: Full-Time
Location: Huntsville, AL
Clearance: Active Secret Clearance
Travel: up to 20%
Waypoint's client is seeking a highly skilled Principal Systems Engineer to provide engineering oversight for target system payloads and countermeasure development. In this role, you will act as a trusted advisor to the program office, delivering critical assessments of prime contractor designs, technical plans, and target instrumentation layouts.
You will serve as a technical anchor during major program milestones-from System Requirements through Product Acceptance-while seamlessly collaborating across multiple organizations, modeling teams, cost analysts, and schedulers to ensure items are delivered accurately and on time.
Responsibilities:- Expert Advisory: Serve as the technical expert on payload and countermeasure requirements development, analysis, design, qualification, and fielding.
- Independent Evaluation: Review and provide assessments of prime contractor designs, plans, reports, and technical procedures.
- Instrumentation Analysis: Evaluate target instrumentation requirements, physical layouts, component selection, and testing methodologies.
- Milestone Reviews: Provide technical evaluation and engineering support during all major program milestones (including SRR, PDR, CDR, TRR, FRB, MRB, and PAR).
- Cross-Agency Coordination: Answer technical inquiries from external MDA organizations and lead multi-disciplinary Technical Interchange Meetings (TIMs).
- Cost Estimation: Provide technical assessments to the cost analysis team to ensure accurate program management budget estimates.
- Schedule Alignment: Partner with the program scheduler to track delivery deadlines and proactively keep leadership advised of status.
Required:- Active DoD Secret clearance.
- Master's degree in STEM and 12+ years supporting missile defense or large-scale, complex DoD programs.
- Experience managing end-to-end program lifecycles, including the development, testing, and fielding of complex systems.
- Thrive in a fast-paced environment where priorities change quickly.
- Handle multiple urgent tasks at once without losing focus.
- Able to support travel request up to 20% of the time.
Desired:- Understanding of IR/RCS signatures for flight objects and countermeasures.
- Experience with material properties and material property measurements.
- Knowledge of real-world threat systems and how they impact target designs.
- Have an understanding of MDA flight test requirements and apply that to the payload hardware development.
- Technical proposal development and evaluation.
