What you'll doYou will lead the Connectivity Management team within Viasat's Commercial Aviation platform, responsible for the software that gets passengers and crew devices onto the network aboard commercial aircraft. Your team owns the core onboard session management stack running on the Mobility Access Server. When a passenger mobile device connects mid-flight, your software is what makes it happen.
This is a multi-year architectural modernization, not a maintenance role - you'll help shape how a mission-critical, resource-constrained system evolves in production.
What you'll lead:
- A geographically distributed team of engineers and architecture stakeholders
- Design, implementation, and production ownership of onboard connectivity services
- A multi-year architectural modernization of the session management stack
- Quality improvements: automated testing pipelines to catch session-management faults before they reach aircraft
- Observability: per-component resource budgets and structured metrics to ground systems
- Cross-team integration with other engineering teams and organizations
This is a site-based role, employees work 3+ days (60%+) per week from a Viasat office or work location within a standard five-day workweek.
The day-to-dayYou will provide leadership for the development of software for edge platforms used in Aviation, delivering connectivity to end user devices leveraging Viasat's networks. The team you lead will support support the critical infrastructure used for creating, testing, and delivering this connectivity via dedicated mobility access servers (MAS). We are looking for leader of a product team that can design, write, and deliver software services to our commercial aircraft. You will influence new designs, architectures, and methods for large-scale distributed systems. As part of our DevOps model, you will develop the service and own it from cradle to grave.
What you'll need- 7+ years of hands-on software engineering (Go, Python, or Java) with systems programming in Linux
- 2+ years leading a cross-functional software team in an agile/DevOps, including distributed time zones
- Strong networking fundamentals: DHCP, DNS, NAT, iptables, TCP/IP, Layer ¾, etc
- Experience with distributed systems where state synchronization failures have real production SLA consequences
- Hands-on Linux, systemd, and containerized workloads (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field
What will help you on the job- Protocol-level networking: AMQP/RabbitMQ, HTTP/3 / QUIC, RADIUS, DHCP option encoding
- Experience building automated integration test frameworks for distributed systems (not just unit tests)
- Experience modernizing a legacy stateful system incrementally in production (feature-flagged migration, dual-run)
- Familiarity with aviation or embedded edge platform constraints - resource-limited hardware, over-the-air software delivery, regulatory environments
- CI/CD experience with Github Actions or Jenkins
- Modern AI-enhanced development workflow
Salary range$168,000.00 - $265,000.00 / annually.For specific work locations within San Jose, the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, the base pay range for this role is $209,000.00- $313,000.00/ annually
At Viasat, we consider many factors when it comes to compensation, including the scope of the position as well as your background and experience. Base pay may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Additional cash or stock incentives may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the position offered. Learn more about Viasat's comprehensive benefit offerings that are focused on your holistic health and wellness at https://careers.viasat.com/benefits.
