Staff Software Engineer, Reliability Engineering & SDLC Governance

One team. Global challenges. Infinite opportunities. At Viasat, we’re on a mission to deliver connections with the capacity to change the world. For more than 35 years, Viasat has helped shape how consumers, businesses, governments and militaries around the globe communicate. We’re looking for people who think big, act fearlessly, and create an inclusive environment that drives positive impact to join our team.

What you'll do

In this role, you will use your technical expertise and operational data to drive continuous improvement and an exceptional customer experience. You will ensure that engineering teams align their requirements, decisions, and quality metrics with a deep understanding of what creates the best possible customer experience. This is a high-visibility, technical leadership role with zero direct reports, requiring a blend of software engineering credibility, DevOps/SRE domain expertise, and organizational change-management skills.

As the Staff Software Engineer, Reliability Engineering & SDLC Governance, you will establish accountability for software quality across the Access Edge organization and drive continuous quality improvement across our entire software delivery lifecycle. You will establish holistic ownership of our SDLC governance while keeping your primary focus on the critical interface between software development and live operations.

You will drive increasing reliability as code moves from conception to production. You will architect operational feedback loops, observability strategies, and shift-left testing paradigms that ensure our full-stack, complex access edge hardware/software/networking environment remains highly reliable.

This is a site-based role, employees work 3+ days (60%+) per week from a Viasat office or work location within a standard five-day workweek.

The day-to-day

• Close the Operational Loop: Establish, govern, and enforce a rigorous operational feedback loop. Own the end-to-end post mortem and Incident Review process, ensuring root-cause analyses are completed on time and actionable remediation items are prioritized and completed.
• Cross-team Technical Liason: Represent Access Edge in engineering-wide quality initiatives; work closely with other parts of the company, e.g. on postmortems, failure mode analysis, disaster recovery, and security.
• Customer-Centric Accountability: Ensure engineering teams maintain an unwavering empathy for the customer through ensuring an excellent quality of service. Guide teams to translate engineering decisions, feature requirements, and technical tradeoffs into their direct impact on the end-user experience.
• Culture of Continuous Improvement: Analyze post-mortem trends and live operational data to identify systemic process and technical execution weaknesses. Lead post-mortem follow-ups to ensure engineering teams are actively iterating, learning, and upgrading their workflows based on real-world customer impacts.
• Quality Metrics & Governance: Define, track, and report on core organizational quality and reliability metrics (e.g., MTTR, MTTD, defect escape rates, change failure rates) across the full lifecycle, ensuring these metrics directly correlate to improved customer satisfaction and system trust.
• SDLC Ownership: Define, institutionalize, and oversee the standards for the software development lifecycle (SDLC), ensuring that quality checkpoints, risk reviews, and reliability frameworks are embedded across all team deployments.

Technical Quality Steering & Modern Paradigms

• Shift-Left Architecture: Partner with engineering leads to promote shift-left testing practices into the early stages of daily development workflows, moving quality verification closer to the point of code creation.
• Observability Strategy: Advise and steer teams on implementing robust observability, telemetry, and monitoring frameworks to detect, isolate, and mitigate anomalies at the access edge before they degrade the customer experience.
• AI Adoption: Actively champion and accelerate the adoption of AI-augmented tools across the SDLC to level up code quality, test generation, and automated refactoring.

Cross-Functional Influence

• Drive Organizational Change: Influence and align multiple distributed engineering teams around shared quality, lifecycle, and operational maturity goals without having direct authority over them.
• Bridge Dev, Ops, & Product: Act as the connective tissue between front-line operations, platform engineering, and product development to build a unified, customer-first culture of reliability.

What you'll need

• Experience: 8+ years of experience software engineering -ideally operating at a Senior or Staff level.
• Technical Background: Proven experience as a Software Engineer. You must possess the technical depth to understand and optimize complex delivery lifecycles.
• Customer-First Mindset: Demonstrated ability to anchor engineering initiatives in user advocacy, ensuring technical requirements are continuously mapped to user experience goals.
• SDLC Leadership: Demonstrated experience managing or establishing comprehensive SDLC governance frameworks across an engineering organization, with a strong emphasis on continuous deployment and automated release gates.
• Complex Ecosystems: Experience working within complex, full-stack environments, preferably dealing with networking architectures, access edge technologies, or highly distributed systems.
• Influence & Accountability: Demonstrated track record of driving large-scale organizational change and holding engineering teams accountable to operational, quality, and continuous improvement standards.

What will help you on the job

• Strong background in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps principles (SLIs/SLOs mapped to customer journeys, error budgets, blameless post-mortems).
• Proven track record of designing and scaling continuous improvement programs across multi-team ecosystems to reduce technical debt and systemic fragility.
• Experience implementing or steering AI-augmented software development and testing tools.
• Advanced proficiency in designing observability and monitoring frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog).
• Experience with building scaled agile processes leveraging AS9115 or similar frameworks.

Salary range

$165,000.00 - $260,500.00 / annually.

For specific work locations within San Jose, the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, the base pay range for this role is $205,000.00- $307,000.00/ annually

At Viasat, we consider many factors when it comes to compensation, including the scope of the position as well as your background and experience. Base pay may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Additional cash or stock incentives may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the position offered. Learn more about Viasat’s comprehensive benefit offerings that are focused on your holistic health and wellness at https://careers.viasat.com/benefits.

EEO Statement

Viasat is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, seeking to create a welcoming and diverse environment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, genetics, age, or veteran status or any other applicable legally protected status or characteristic. If you would like to request an accommodation on the basis of disability for completing this on-line application, please click here.

• Close the Operational Loop: Establish, govern, and enforce a rigorous operational feedback loop. Own the end-to-end post mortem and Incident Review process, ensuring root-cause analyses are completed on time and actionable remediation items are prioritized and completed.
• Cross-team Technical Liason: Represent Access Edge in engineering-wide quality initiatives; work closely with other parts of the company, e.g. on postmortems, failure mode analysis, disaster recovery, and security.
• Customer-Centric Accountability: Ensure engineering teams maintain an unwavering empathy for the customer through ensuring an excellent quality of service. Guide teams to translate engineering decisions, feature requirements, and technical tradeoffs into their direct impact on the end-user experience.
• Culture of Continuous Improvement: Analyze post-mortem trends and live operational data to identify systemic process and technical execution weaknesses. Lead post-mortem follow-ups to ensure engineering teams are actively iterating, learning, and upgrading their workflows based on real-world customer impacts.
• Quality Metrics & Governance: Define, track, and report on core organizational quality and reliability metrics (e.g., MTTR, MTTD, defect escape rates, change failure rates) across the full lifecycle, ensuring these metrics directly correlate to improved customer satisfaction and system trust.
• SDLC Ownership: Define, institutionalize, and oversee the standards for the software development lifecycle (SDLC), ensuring that quality checkpoints, risk reviews, and reliability frameworks are embedded across all team deployments.

Technical Quality Steering & Modern Paradigms

• Shift-Left Architecture: Partner with engineering leads to promote shift-left testing practices into the early stages of daily development workflows, moving quality verification closer to the point of code creation.
• Observability Strategy: Advise and steer teams on implementing robust observability, telemetry, and monitoring frameworks to detect, isolate, and mitigate anomalies at the access edge before they degrade the customer experience.
• AI Adoption: Actively champion and accelerate the adoption of AI-augmented tools across the SDLC to level up code quality, test generation, and automated refactoring.

Cross-Functional Influence

• Drive Organizational Change: Influence and align multiple distributed engineering teams around shared quality, lifecycle, and operational maturity goals without having direct authority over them.
• Bridge Dev, Ops, & Product: Act as the connective tissue between front-line operations, platform engineering, and product development to build a unified, customer-first culture of reliability.

• Experience: 8+ years of experience software engineering -ideally operating at a Senior or Staff level.
• Technical Background: Proven experience as a Software Engineer. You must possess the technical depth to understand and optimize complex delivery lifecycles.
• Customer-First Mindset: Demonstrated ability to anchor engineering initiatives in user advocacy, ensuring technical requirements are continuously mapped to user experience goals.
• SDLC Leadership: Demonstrated experience managing or establishing comprehensive SDLC governance frameworks across an engineering organization, with a strong emphasis on continuous deployment and automated release gates.
• Complex Ecosystems: Experience working within complex, full-stack environments, preferably dealing with networking architectures, access edge technologies, or highly distributed systems.
• Influence & Accountability: Demonstrated track record of driving large-scale organizational change and holding engineering teams accountable to operational, quality, and continuous improvement standards.