Senior Systems Engineer

Polara; Plano, Northern (TX, KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Polara Senior Systems Engineer is responsible for defining, developing, integrating, and validating system-level architectures for advanced traffic sensing, detection, communication, and control products and systems.

The role guides across electrical hardware, embedded software, communications, networking, power, mechanical systems, and IoT/cloud services to deliver reliable, scalable integrated solutions across the product lifecycle.

Qualifications

• Lead development and documentation of system architectures for traffic sensing, detection, communication, and control products.
• Translate market requirements, customer needs, regulatory requirements, and operational constraints into clear, measurable system requirements.
• Develop and maintain PRDs, SRS, ICDs, system block diagrams, and other systems-engineering artifacts.
• Define system boundaries, functional decomposition, data flows, operating modes and system behaviors.
• Allocate requirements across subsystems and maintain traceability.
• Perform architectural trade studies considering performance, cost, cybersecurity, and lifecycle needs.
• Define and support system integration, verification and validation strategies, acceptance criteria, and field trials.
• Lead and participate in reviews and provide support to manufacturing, quality, and field teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead system architecture development for ITS product lines.
• Capture and translate customer and regulatory needs into verifiable requirements.
• Create and maintain system documents including ICDs and system diagrams.
• Define interfaces, data flows, and operating modes for subsystems.
• Ensure traceability of requirements across hardware, software, and sensors.
• Conduct trade studies assessing performance, reliability, and cybersecurity.
• Plan system verification, validation, and field trials with cross-functional teams.
• Support production, quality, and field teams during deployment and sustainment.

Skills

System architecture

Requirements engineering

V&V planning

Systems integration

Technical leadership

Risk assessment

Job description

Description

The Senior Systems Engineer is responsible for defining, developing, integrating, and validating system-level architectures for advanced traffic sensing, detection, communication, and control products and systems.

This role provides technical leadership across the product development lifecycle, translating market, customer, regulatory, and operational needs into system requirements, architectures, interfaces, and verification strategies. The Senior Systems Engineer works across electrical hardware, embedded software, communications, networking, power, mechanical systems, and IoT/cloud services to ensure products operate as reliable, maintainable, scalable, and integrated systems.

The position requires broad technical knowledge of technologies applicable to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), including power distribution, solar power, electronic hardware, embedded systems, sensors, wired and wireless communications, TCP/IP networking, power line communication, industrial IoT, telemetry, remote monitoring, and functional safety.

The Senior Systems Engineer collaborates with Product Management, Applications Engineering, Hardware Engineering, Firmware/Software Engineering, Manufacturing, Quality, and other stakeholders throughout the product lifecycle.

Requirements

• Lead development and documentation of system architectures for traffic sensing, detection, communication, and control products and integrated solutions.
• Translate market requirements, customer needs, use cases, regulatory requirements, and operational constraints into clear, measurable, and verifiable system and product requirements.
• Develop and maintain Product Requirements Documents (PRDs), System Requirements Specifications, Interface Control Documents (ICDs), system block diagrams, and other systems-engineering artifacts.
• Define system boundaries, functional decomposition, subsystem responsibilities, interfaces, data flows, operating modes, and system behaviors.
• Allocate requirements across hardware, firmware/software, communications, power, mechanical, IoT/cloud, and other subsystems and maintain requirements traceability.
• Research, evaluate, and qualify technologies, devices, SoCs, communication modules, sensors, and other components supporting product and platform architectures.
• Develop reusable platform architectures, components, interfaces, communication methods, and telemetry capabilities to increase design reuse and reduce development cycle time.
• Define system approaches for telemetry, configuration, remote diagnostics, health monitoring, event reporting, and device management.
• Perform architectural trade studies considering performance, reliability, cost, power, manufacturability, maintainability, cybersecurity, scalability, and lifecycle requirements.
• Define system operating modes, fault responses, degraded operation, fail-safe behaviors, and recovery strategies.
• Identify and manage technical risks using appropriate systems-engineering methods such as FMEA, design reviews, and technical risk assessments.
• Define and support system integration, verification and validation (V&V) strategies, acceptance criteria, qualification testing, and field trials.
• Lead system-level troubleshooting and root-cause analysis of complex field and product issues involving hardware, firmware/software, communications, power, networking, and customer infrastructure.
• Perform or support detailed hardware and embedded software development when required for prototyping, troubleshooting, or technical risk reduction.
• Lead and participate in requirements reviews, architecture reviews, design reviews, system readiness reviews, and engineering peer reviews.
• Support Manufacturing, Quality, Applications Engineering, and field teams during product introduction, deployment, and sustaining engineering.
• Identify opportunities to continuously improve systems-engineering practices, product architectures, development processes, and technical documentation.