Hybrid Systems Engineer – Defence

at Positiv Cohort Ltd

• Job title: Systems Engineer – Defence
• Job type: Contract
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Stevenage, United Kingdom

About the role

• Systems Engineer responsible for mechanical requirements management and interface control in complex aerospace projects. Leading technical deliverables and stakeholder engagement for missile systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead the creation, ownership, and maintenance of the Missile Airframe Task Requirements Specification (TRS), ensuring a clear, structured, and traceable response to the overarching Missile TRS.
• Ensure mechanical and thermal requirements are unambiguous, verifiable, and consistently interpreted across all missile variants and development teams.
• Manage requirements flow-down, allocation, and change control, maintaining alignment between system intent and lower-level requirements.
• Act as the authority for mechanical requirements interpretation and compliance status.
• Define, manage, and control mechanical and thermal interface requirements, ensuring consistency across system, sub-system, and equipment boundaries.
• Own the mechanical interface requirements with the launcher, ensuring compatibility with system constraints and customer expectations.
• Coordinate interface inputs across multiple disciplines, maintaining clear ownership, documentation, and change governance.
• Serve as the mechanical requirements and interface focal point between systems engineering, detailed design teams, suppliers, and external stakeholders.
• Apply and enforce Generic Missile Architecture (GMA) policies through robust requirements definition, supporting modularity, reuse, and commonality across product variants.
• Ensure requirements packages enable common solutions while clearly identifying variant-specific constraints.
• Promote disciplined requirements governance to support lifecycle cost reduction, configurability, and long-term product evolution.
• Define and own the mechanical verification and validation strategy, clearly linking each requirement to an appropriate means of compliance.
• Develop and maintain airframe proving logic, ensuring mechanical and thermal requirements can be objectively verified.
• Track and report mechanical compliance status against the Airframe TRS, supporting design reviews, audits, and certification milestones.
• Contribute to the evidence base required to achieve Certificate of Design and other regulatory approvals.
• Support customer engagement by providing clear, defensible rationale for mechanical requirements, interfaces, and compliance approaches.
• Participate in technical discussions with customers, partners, and suppliers, representing the mechanical requirements package with confidence and clarity.
• Support the management of customer expectations by providing transparent status and impact assessments related to mechanical requirements.
• Produce Statements of Work (SOWs), work packages, and plans related to mechanical systems engineering and requirements activities.
• Support programme planning, scheduling, and risk management, ensuring requirements activities are realistic, resourced, and aligned with programme milestones.
• Identify and manage risks related to requirements definition, interfaces, and verification maturity.

Requirements

• Degree in Mechanical Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Proven experience in systems engineering within complex, safety‑critical environments (e.g. aerospace, defence, missile systems).
• Strong experience in requirements engineering, including specification writing, traceability, change management, and compliance tracking.
• Experience producing and managing requirements specifications, interface control documents, and verification plans.
• Ability to operate effectively at both system and sub-system level, balancing technical rigor with programme needs.
• Experience working with missile, airframe, or launcher systems.
• Understanding of thermal management and environmental qualification requirements.
• Familiarity with modular product architectures and product line approaches.
• Experience supporting certification, qualification, or regulatory approval activities.