Software Architect Contract Jobs in Colorado (NOW HIRING)

Job Summary:
Quindar is seeking a Mission Integration Engineer to help define, architect, and deliver integrated satellite ground systems for commercial and government customers. The role involves becoming a subject matter expert on Quindar’s platform and the customer’s mission, ensuring that technical solutions are delivered and verified. Candidates will work cross-functionally with various teams to shape contract scope, define mission architectures, and manage requirements.
Responsibilities:
• Serve as a technical subject matter expert for customer opportunities, deeply understanding the customer’s mission, CONOPS, operational needs, interfaces, constraints, and success criteria.
• Lead solution architecture for commercial and government opportunities.
• Partner with sales and business development teams to shape deal strategy, technical scope, proposal approach, and customer-facing solution narratives.
• Support technical proposal development, including RFI/RFP responses, compliance matrices, architecture descriptions, technical volumes, BOEs, demos, and customer design reviews.
• Translate customer mission needs into clear technical solutions that align Quindar’s platform capabilities, product roadmap, engineering capacity, and delivery approach.
• Identify product gaps, integration risks, and architectural tradeoffs early in the opportunity lifecycle and drive alignment across internal teams.
• Support customer meetings, technical interchange meetings, site visits, conferences, and program reviews as needed.
• Own the systems engineering process and outcomes for assigned missions, with the level of rigor tailored to the customer and program.
• Lead or coordinate requirements development, requirements management, interface definition, architecture documentation, verification planning, and acceptance criteria.
• Own the verification and validation process across mission threads, including commanding, telemetry, automation, mission data flows, operational workflows, and mission-specific analytics.
• Coordinate V&V execution across product, software engineering, forward-deployed engineering, customer, and program stakeholders.
• Develop and maintain mission-relevant systems engineering artifacts such as requirements documents, ICDs, CONOPS, verification matrices, test plans, acceptance plans, and architecture models.
• Support more formal systems engineering approaches for government programs, including traceability, documentation discipline, MBSE, and structured technical reviews.
• Ensure technical decisions are clearly documented, communicated, and aligned across customer, engineering, product, and delivery teams.
• Advise product strategy and roadmap direction based on recurring customer needs, mission patterns, and technical gaps observed across opportunities and integrations.
• Distinguish between one-off mission-specific needs and repeatable platform capabilities that should influence product direction.
• Work with product and engineering teams to define feature requirements, technical priorities, and architectural considerations for mission-driven capabilities.
• Maintain a strong understanding of Quindar’s platform, software architecture, deployment models, and technical constraints in order to represent the product accurately and credibly to customers.
• Help ensure Quindar’s platform evolves in a way that supports a broad range of mission classes, customer environments, and operational models.
• Function as a Mission Architect alongside the Chief Engineer, Software Architect, Lead Mission Architect, and other technical leaders.
• Bridge customer needs, sales strategy, product capabilities, software implementation, and delivery execution.
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to customers, executives, engineers, operators, and program stakeholders.
• Drive alignment across teams in ambiguous or fast-moving situations.
• Help establish scalable practices, templates, and technical patterns for future opportunities and missions.
Qualifications:
Required:
• 5+ years of relevant experience in satellite ground systems, mission integration, systems engineering, technical sales, mission operations, software platform engineering, government aerospace programs, spacecraft systems, or a related field.
• Experience working with complex technical systems that require coordination across software, hardware, operations, customer, and program stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to understand a technical system deeply and translate customer or mission needs into executable architecture, requirements, scope, and delivery plans.
• Experience supporting customer-facing technical work such as solution architecture, technical proposals, design reviews, requirements discussions, integration planning, or technical program execution.
• Familiarity with satellite operations, TT&C concepts, ground system architectures, mission operations workflows, or spacecraft-to-ground interfaces.
• Strong technical communication skills, including the ability to write clearly, present technical concepts, and create structured documentation.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Active Top Secret clearance required on day one.
• To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
Preferred:
• 8–12+ years of experience for senior or principal-level candidates.
• Prior experience with government space programs, classified programs, or formal aerospace systems engineering processes.
• Experience with technical proposal development, RFP/RFI responses, compliance matrices, solution narratives, or scope definition.
• Experience with requirements management, V&V planning, acceptance testing, ICDs, CONOPS, MBSE, and technical review processes.
• Familiarity with Cameo, SysML, Git-based engineering workflows, or similar systems engineering and documentation approaches.
• Experience with cloud-based ground systems, modern software platforms, APIs, automation, and satellite operations software.
• Ability to code or script when needed, especially for analysis, test automation, system configuration, prototyping, or workflow acceleration.
• Comfort using modern AI tools to improve technical analysis, documentation, proposal development, systems engineering workflows, and engineering productivity.
• Experience with containerized or cloud deployments, such as Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, or AWS GovCloud.
Company:
Quindar builds a cloud platform for satellite mission, enabling planning, and monitoring of spacecraft operations with AI support. Founded in 2022, the company is headquartered in Arvada, USA, with a team of 51-200 employees. The company is currently Growth Stage.