Senior Digital Payload Systems Engineer

Viasat; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Viasat is seeking an experienced Digital Payload Systems Engineer to lead end-to-end digital space systems architecture in a senior technical role. You will own performance, dependencies, and verification across FPGA/ASIC domains, coordinating across hardware, firmware, and software teams.

The role requires deep systems judgment, strong communication, and mentoring abilities to influence outcomes without direct authority.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in a relevant technical field or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of systems engineering experience in digital payloads or mission-critical systems.
• Ownership of payload/system-level budgets for performance, latency, throughput, and risk.
• Strong requirements development, decomposition, allocation, and traceability.

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 development

FPGA

ASIC

Aerospace

Requirements decomposition

Traceability

Verification strategy

Communication skills

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Engineering/Physics/Computer/Electrical Engineering

Tools

VHDL

Verilog

SystemVerilog

Job description

Viasat is seeking an experienced Digital Payload Systems Engineer to lead end-to-end digital space systems architecture in a senior technical role. You will own performance, dependencies, and verification across FPGA/ASIC domains, coordinating across hardware, firmware, and software teams.

The role requires deep systems judgment, strong communication, and mentoring abilities to influence outcomes without direct authority.