Industry SME Contractor

Job Description Job Description Primary Skill Required for the Role Systems Architect Level Required for Primary Skill Expert (10 years experience) Additional Skills Requested for Role (No Value)
The Lead Product Engineer / Architect will serve as the senior technical authority for the offering, working as a peer to the Lead Product Manager. This role will shape the technical vision, architecture, engineering standards, and delivery roadmap across cyber, software, hardware, AI, space, ground, and user segments.

The ideal candidate can translate complex mission and security requirements into scalable, commercially viable solutions that can be deployed repeatably across clients. REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
" Bachelor s degree required
" Must be U.S.

Citizen
" 10 years of experience as a product engineer, solution architect, systems architect, technical product leader, or similar role delivering complex cyber, aerospace, space, embedded, or mission-critical systems.
" Proven leadership delivering complex, multidisciplinary cyber and/or space systems to production and operations.
" Deep experience designing secure architectures across cloud, on-premises, hybrid, and space/embedded constraints, with strong systems-thinking and an integration background (interfaces, constraints, failure modes).
" Demonstrated authorship of reference architectures, patterns, or platforms adopted by multiple teams, ideally productized offerings deployed across more than one client or environment.
" Sufficient cross-domain depth (embedded/space, AI/ML, ground segment, cloud/DevOps) to serve as the senior technical sounding board for the specialist workstream leads, pressure-testing the tradeoffs each otherwise makes in isolation.
" Strong grasp of security architecture: identity, key management, secure boot and update, segmentation, data protection, logging and telemetry, and supply chain.
" Experience operating under compliance constraints (NIST, ATO, STIGs, CMMC, as applicable) and translating them into executable delivery controls and compliance-ready designs.
" Calm, decisive leadership under uncertainty, with strong incident- and risk-management discipline.
" Proven ability to influence without direct authority, with excellent written and verbal communication across technical and executive audiences.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
" Experience taking a product or platform to market commercially pilots, co-development, or first-of-kind deployments with external clients.
" Experience with satellite mission operations or aerospace delivery environments.
" Background in embedded and real-time systems integration.
" Familiarity with AI/ML model deployment pipelines in constrained environments.
" Background in SPARTA (Space Attack Research and Tactic Analysis) threat frameworks.
" Active security clearance (Secret or higher) for government-adjacent commercial work.
" Working fluency across the platform tech stack, enough to guide design decisions in each domain: embedded/space (C, POSIX, real-time OS); AI/ML (Python, PyTorch); ground segment (Docker, Grafana, MQTT, Node.js); CI/CD and DevOps (GitHub Actions, automated security scanning, containerized deployments).

EEO

Mindlance is an

Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate in employment on the basis of Minority/Gender/Disability/Religion/LGBTQI/Age/Veterans.