Senior Principal Media Architect

SES Satellites; Ellenwood (GA); On-site; USD 111,000 - 177,000; Full time

Job summary

SES Satellites in Ellenwood, GA seeks a Senior Principal Media Architect/Analyst to define, maintain, and evolve architectural frameworks for media services, translating product requirements into scalable, implementable solutions.

You will lead engineers, drive standardization and governance, and collaborate with Product, Planning, and Operations to ensure reliability and operational readiness across platforms.

Qualifications

• Bachelor-level degree in engineering or related field.
• 7+ years of experience designing, integrating, implementing, or supporting complex media/broadcast systems.
• Experience creating high-level designs, reference architectures, system diagrams, signal flows, and implementation requirements.
• Experience translating product or business requirements into technically realizable solutions.

Responsibilities

• Define, maintain, and evolve reusable reference architectures and target-state architectures.
• Lead architecture reviews and govern compliance with standards.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to align roadmaps with platform capabilities.
• Coordinate requirements across multiple teams early in the service lifecycle.
• Provide implementation-ready architectural direction and acceptance criteria.

Skills

Technical leadership

Architecture governance

End-to-end architectures

Stakeholder communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in engineering or related field

Advanced degree in engineering/CS/architecture

Tools

CMDB integration

Media monitoring

Job description

Role Description Summary

The Senior Principal Media Architect / Analyst is a senior technical contributor responsible for defining, maintaining, and evolving the technical architectures that support the organization’s media services and platforms. The role develops standardized, scalable, and supportable service designs that translate product and commercial requirements into implementation-ready technical solutions.

Requisition Number: 20351

Contract Type: Permanent

Location(s): Ellenwood, GA, US

Senior Architect, Media Architecture 1

The Senior Principal Media Architect / Analyst is a senior technical contributor responsible for defining, maintaining, and evolving the technical architectures that support the organization’s media services and platforms. The role develops standardized, scalable, and supportable service designs that translate product and commercial requirements into implementation-ready technical solutions.

This position serves as a technical authority within the Media Architecture team and helps ensure that the organization’s media platforms continuously and reliably deliver the services sold to customers while realizing the adoption of reusable reference architectures, homogeneous design patterns, and engineering best practices that reduce unnecessary technical variation while accelerating the delivery of new services.

We are seeking a candidate to lead a team of technical professionals in identifying requirements, architectural gaps, implementation dependencies, and operational considerations early in the service-development lifecycle. This role will serve as a critical bridge between customer requirements, solution architecture, engineering execution, and operational readiness. The successful candidate will drive greater standardization, documentation quality, monitoring, supportability, and technical governance, contributing to improved service stability, reduced technical debt, fewer recurring architecture-related incidents, and a more scalable and repeatable approach to delivering media services across the organization.

Primary Responsibilities / Key Result Areas

• Define, maintain, and evolve reusable reference architectures, standardized design patterns, and target‑state architectures across the organization’s media platforms and services.
• Convert product capabilities, customer requirements, service definitions, and commercial commitments into scalable, supportable, and technically achievable architectures.
• Develop and govern high‑level designs, logical signal flows, system boundaries, interfaces, dependencies, resiliency models, monitoring requirements, capacity considerations, and operational requirements.
• Provide architectural leadership for major transformation initiatives, assess emerging technologies, simplify and consolidate platforms, reduce technical debt, and incorporate lessons from deployments and operational incidents into future architecture standards and designs.
• Partner with Product, Commercial, Planning, and Engineering teams to ensure product roadmaps and proposed services remain aligned with current and planned platform capabilities.
• Coordinate requirements across Product, Planning, Network Engineering, Media Engineering, Execution, and Operations, resolving design conflicts and identifying dependencies, constraints, and risks early in the service lifecycle.
• Support Planning and Media Architects with solution shaping, technical feasibility assessments, architecture guardrails, and identification of operational or implementation constraints before commitments are finalized.
• Lead architecture reviews, govern compliance with approved standards, define required engineering deliverables, maintain architecture decision traceability, and provide technical approval for proposed media solutions.
• Provide implementation‑ready architectural direction, define sequencing, migration and rollback considerations, establish acceptance criteria, support Engineering Design Readiness reviews, and confirm deployed solutions remain aligned with approved designs.
• Ensure new services include implementation traceability, service inventory, operational documentation, support procedures, recovery requirements, and formal handover criteria.

Competencies

• Represent the Media Engineering &Architecture team in technical working sessions and cross‑functional project discussions as assigned.
• Ensure project execution follows defined engineering processes, meets operational requirements, and maintains high‑quality deliverables and documentation.
• Provide technical leadership and architecture governance with an end‑to‑end system thinking for the early identification of technical gaps, operational risks, and implementation dependencies
• Introduce and enforce operational readiness to media implementation processes and foster cross‑functional collaboration in complete and consistent architecture and as‑build documentation
• Continuously support Product, Commercial, Planning, Engineering, Execution, and Operations in the reduction of design exceptions, unsupported implementations, and unnecessary technical variation.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, telecommunications, computer engineering, computer science, broadcast engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent relevant professional experience.
• At least seven years of experience designing, integrating, implementing, or supporting complex media, broadcast, video, telecommunications, or content‑distribution systems.
• Demonstrated experience developing end‑to‑end technical architectures involving multiple platforms, locations, interfaces, and engineering disciplines.
• Strong understanding of architecture principles, systems engineering, technical governance, and service lifecycle management.
• Experience creating high‑level designs, reference architectures, system diagrams, signal flows, technical standards, and implementation requirements.
• Experience translating product, business, or customer requirements into technically realizable solutions.
• Strong understanding of service resilience, redundancy, monitoring, fault management, capacity planning, performance, and operational support requirements.
• Ability to evaluate complex technical information and communicate clear recommendations to both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Strong written communication, technical documentation, facilitation, and presentation skills.
• Ability to perform physical support activities when required (e.g., cable handling, racking/stacking hardware).
• Ability and willingness to travel domestically and internationally up to 20–25%.

Other Key Requirements / Comments

• Advanced degree in engineering, telecommunications, computer science, systems architecture, or a related discipline.
• Expert‑level knowledge with large‑scale media contribution, processing, transport, distribution, or playout environments.
• Expert‑level knowledge with traditional broadcast, IP‑based media, cloud, virtualized, and hybrid media architectures.
• Experience with media‑service monitoring, service inventory, configuration management, CMDB integration, and operational‑assurance platforms.
• Experience supporting major platform transformations, network migrations, technology‑refresh programs, or service‑modernization initiatives.
• Expert‑level knowledge defining architecture exception processes, technical‑debt remediation plans, or target‑state roadmaps.
• Experience with formal systems‑engineering, enterprise‑architecture, or architecture‑governance frameworks.
• Experience mentoring engineers or providing technical leadership across geographically distributed teams.

The salary range for this full‑time position is $110,640 - $176,600

Salary ranges are determined by role, level, and geographic location. Individual compensation within the range is determined based on work location and a variety of factors, including job‑related skills, experience, qualifications, and relevant education or training.

Additional compensation and benefits may apply depending on the location and terms of employment.

SES and its Affiliated Companies are committed to providing fair and equal employment opportunities to all. We are an Equal Opportunity employer and will consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, genetic information, protected veteran status, disability, or any other basis protected by local, state, or federal law.

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