Senior Systems Engineer

Wabtec Corporation is a leading global provider of equipment, systems, digital solutions and value-added services for freight and transit rail. Drawing on nearly four centuries of collective experience across Wabtec, GE Transportation and Faiveley Transport, the company has unmatched digital expertise, technological innovation, and world-class manufacturing and services, enabling the digital-rail-and-transit ecosystems. Wabtec is focused on performance that drives progress, creating transportation solutions that move and improve the world. Wabtec has approximately 27,000 employees in facilities throughout the world. Visit the company’s new website at: http://www.WabtecCorp.com.

It’s not just about your career… or your job title…it’s about who you are and the impact you are going to make on the world. Do you want to go into uncharted waters…do things that haven’t been done to make yours and someone else's life better? Wabtec has been doing that for decades and we will continue to do so! Through our people, leadership development, services, technology and scale, Wabtec delivers better outcomes for global customers by speaking the language of industry.

Business Overview:

Wabtec’s Dispatch System  is an advanced software solution that provides real-time train dispatching functions that direct and control the movement of trains over a railroad network

Job Overview:

Experienced System Engineer to serve as the Lead System Engineer for Wabtec’s Customers.   In this role, you will work directly with the Customer to define and document the Features and functionality to be developed by Wabtec, along with the associated acceptance criteria.  Additionally, you will work very closely the Wabtec Project Manager, Technical Director, Test Manager, Project Product Owners and the Dispatch Director.

You will review incoming defects & enhancement requests, understand the underlying need/benefit to the customer, determine the request’s alignment with the product line and ensure responses to the customer are provided in a timely fashion. You will apply Agile principles to convert customer requests into defects or feature/ user stories, provide acceptance criteria for work items to the team.

You will direct the team with a clear and descriptive set of requirements captured as features and stories and partner with the team to determine what can be delivered through balancing the need for new features, defects, and technical debt.   Your priority is seamless integration and alignment of perspectives from a broad set of stakeholders: Product Managers, Project Managers, Technical Anchors, Service Owners, testers and Developers.

Essential Responsibilities:

In this role, you will:

• Serve as the work content authority for the team’s backlog, prioritization of the backlog, and represent the customer’s needs to the teams. Coordinate with the scrum team PO’s who own their team’s backlog.   Own the overall project backlog and continuously order and prioritize to ensure sprint planning readiness.
• Collaborate with the Project Manager to define the short-term roadmap for sprint backlogs and prepare capabilities/features for planning. Collaborate Project PO’s and the Technical Director to decompose features into vertical slice user stories with SMART acceptance criteria and well-defined business needs. Frequently engage the team to provide clarification, story acceptance and refinement and communicate decisions to the development team.
• Serve as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for the Dispatch product line, understand the relationship and interaction across components, and clearly explain and define system behavior to the customer and development teams.
• Triage escalated customer reported problems, quickly determine if the expected behavior is not met, and define severity and priority. Actively look to reduce the investigation load from the team by performing the initial investigations until the reported system behavior is understood.
• Demonstrate expert level skill in problem decomposition and ability to navigate through ambiguity
• Engage frequently (80%) with the development team; facilitate discussions, provide clarification, story acceptance and refinement, testing and validation; contributes to design activities and decisions
• Own and manage the overall Project Backlog; continuously order and prioritize to ensure that 1-2 sprints/iterations of backlog are always ready
• Provide accurate and timely status of Content plan and current execution status to Customer and GE leadership.
• Demonstrate superior persuasion and influencing skills that ensure alignment between customer, product manager and engineering team
• Demonstrates excelling business acumen, knows latest industry trends and is looked at as an internal expert on the product as well as the associated competitive landscape
• Coach and Mentor junior team members

•      Understand security and compliance requirements; establish seamless integration with Cyber Security and Compliance teams

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or in “STEM” Majors (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math)
• A minimum of 10 years of professional experience in System Engineer Role OR Master’s degree with 6 years of experience

Desired Characteristics:

• Hands-on experience in decomposing requirements into robust Agile based Features and User Stories, including strong acceptance criteria and requirement traceability. Able to translate unstructured or ambiguous work requests into actionable user stories.

• Ability to understand the technology stack and its impact on the final product. Capable of efficiently conducting customer and stakeholder interviews and elaborate on personas.

• Experience with AzureDevOps/Rally, Jira, CLM DOORS or other defect/requirement tracking tools. Capable of generating Agile metrics reports (burn-up, burn-down, velocity, etc.) and interpreting the results for larger audiences.

• Superior knowledge of the Software Development Life Cycle and strong collaboration history with Quality Engineering and Dev Ops teams.

• Strong problem-solving abilities and capable of articulating specific technical topics or assignments to others. Ability to break down complex problems and estimate level of effort.

Business Acumen:

• Demonstrates the initiative to explore alternate technology and approaches to solving problems
• Skilled in breaking down problems, documenting problem statements and estimating efforts
• Has the ability to analyze impact of technology choices
• Demonstrates knowledge of technologies in the market to help make buy vs build recommendations, scope MVPs, and to drive market timing decisions

Leadership:

• Excellent communicator with customer and engineering. 
• Demonstrates clarity of thinking to work through limited information and vague problem definitions
• Influences through others; builds direct and "behind the scenes" support for ideas. Pre-emptively sees downstream consequences and effectively tailors influencing strategy to support a positive outcome.
• Uses experts or third parties to influence decisions. Uses facts and not emotions to support ideas.
• Able to verbalize what is behind decisions and downstream implications. Continuously reflecting on successes and failures to improve performance and decision-making. Understands when change is needed.
• Participates in technical strategy planning.
• Proactively identifies and removes project obstacles or barriers on behalf of the team. Able to navigate accountability in a matrixed organization.

Personal Attributes:

• Able to work under minimal supervision
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to interface with senior leadership with confidence and clarity
• Able to work well with global teams, including time-zone flexibility
• Skilled in providing oversight and mentoring team members. Shows ability to effectively delegate work.

Wabtec Corporation is committed to taking on the world’s toughest challenges. In order to fulfill that commitment we rely on a culture of leadership, diversity and inclusiveness. We aim to employ the world’s brightest minds to help us create a limitless source of ideas and opportunities. We believe in hiring talented people of varied backgrounds, experiences and styles…people like you! Wabtec Corporation is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or expression, or protected Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.