Senior Digital Payload Systems Engineer

Viasat; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Viasat is seeking an experienced Digital Payload Systems Engineer to provide technical leadership for complex digital space systems. This role owns end-to-end payload architecture, system performance, requirements, budgets, verification strategy, and payload evolution.

The successful candidate will serve as a senior technical authority across FPGA and ASIC based digital systems, defining problems, steering architecture decisions, and mentoring other engineers within programs.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Physics, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field.
• 8+ years of experience in systems engineering, digital payload development, FPGA/ASIC based systems, aerospace, space, or mission-critical systems.
• Ability to independently define ambiguous technical problems and drive resolution across teams.
• Proven experience owning payload or system-level technical budgets for performance, latency, throughput, power, timing, resources, margin, and risk.
• Deep experience with requirements development, decomposition, allocation, traceability, and verification closure.
• Strong understanding of full lifecycle systems engineering from concept through integration, verification, and operation.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end digital payload system performance, architecture, requirements, and verification strategy.
• Lead architecture definition and trade studies for FPGA, ASIC, DSP, high-speed I/O, clocking, and payload processing systems.
• Define and resolve complex system-level problems across hardware, firmware, software, RF, integration, and test teams.
• Drive design decisions for beamforming, channelization, regenerative payloads, and standards-based implementations including DVB-S2, DVB-S2X, DVB-RCS, and 3GPP.
• Own technical budgets, margin posture, assumptions, risks, and analytical models supporting program decisions.
• Develop and maintain key technical artifacts, including SRDs, TRDs, interface specifications, trade studies, and verification plans.
• Lead requirements decomposition, allocation, traceability, and burndown across subsystem teams.
• Support major lifecycle reviews including SRR, PDR, CDR, test readiness, and operational readiness reviews.
• Define system-level verification and validation strategies with integration and test teams.
• Provide technical leadership on interfaces, timing, throughput, resource utilization, high-speed data movement, and payload processing behavior.
• Communicate technical recommendations, risks, and tradeoffs to engineering and program leadership.
• Mentor engineers and help improve systems engineering practices, standards, and digital payload development processes.

Skills

Systems engineering

Digital payload

FPGA/ASIC

Aerospace/space

Budget ownership

Requirements management

Lifecycle engineering

Mentoring

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

VHDL

Verilog/SystemVerilog

Job description

Viasat is seeking an experienced Digital Payload Systems Engineer to provide technical leadership for complex digital space systems. This role owns end-to-end payload architecture, system performance, requirements, budgets, verification strategy, and payload evolution.

The successful candidate will serve as a senior technical authority across FPGA and ASIC based digital systems, defining problems, steering architecture decisions, and mentoring other engineers within programs.