Senior Systems Engineer

Job Description

Senior System Engineer

The Scope of the Role

The post holder shall provide technical expertise and advice at strategic and tactical level to actively promote, support and establish fit for purpose and efficient system engineering activity throughout the project delivery, at all stages of their lifecycle.

The Senior Systems Engineer role shall be:

• Safeguarding the project objectives, such as:
• Line extensions,
• Capacity enlistment
• Signaling upgrades
• Replacing a rolling stock with a brand-new fleet and carrying out all of the associated line-wide infrastructure upgrades to enable the new fleet.
• Ensuring that systems thinking is at the forefront of decision-making.
• Responsible for defining and delivering the Systems Engineering deliverables for the project, including but not limited to capturing the complete project requirements, the Systems Engineering Management Plan (SEMP) and Interface Control Documents (ICDs), etc.
• Responsible for ensuring that the project has good systems engineering practice and compliance throughout.
• Responsible for supporting the project to achieve the strategic milestone(s).
• Conducting gap analyses to support the development of system requirements based on several requirements documents and other historic sources, and in conjunction with the delivery of a feasibility package of works.
• Supporting the Requirements Engineers in mapping former documents to the project requirements and identifying gaps or areas not covered by source documents.
• Supporting the Project Engineer to draft the scopes of work for the external delivery packages, etc.

Key Duties, Responsibilities and Accountabilities

• Subject Matter Expert(s) and central contact for:
• - Systems Engineering
• - Integration related concerns
• - issues impacting or likely to impact the project delivery.
• Lead an interdisciplinary process to ensure that the user/stakeholder needs are correctly identified, translated into appropriate requirements, solutions, and satisfied throughout the delivery lifecycle
• Responsible for:
• - Methods that manage system change and risk through system definition, hierarchy, optimisation, properties and interactions within the transportation system.
• - Ensuring continuity between RAIDDO, ARM, Hazard Log and the DOORs requirement database, supporting integration between the platforms and ensuring data quality and integrity throughout.
• Support any outstanding requirements extraction for any outstanding undefined scopes.
• Accountable for:
• - The overall systems integration of a capital project or sub-projects throughout the lifecycle
• - Working with and possibly managing teams of project and discipline engineers to ensure that scope is clear.
• - Ensuring that the scope of the project is designed and delivered to cost, schedule and meet it requirements.
• Establish fit for purpose and efficient system engineering and system integration activity throughout all levels of the projects, at all stages of the lifecycle
• Identify and manage interface control documentation between work packages and define and record any key interface and integration risks between work packages.
• Provide input into requirement / design changes throughout the project lifecycle. Assess the change and the impact of a change request.
• Support the creation and management of project specific Migration Plans, Matrices and Assurance Roadmaps.
• Manage requirements at all levels in the DOORs database.
• Ensure traceability exists between all requirements within the DOORs database.
• Review and comment on assurance documentation during the design, construction, testing and commissioning phases of the projects
• Support the management of the relevant requirements database including the development and the on-going management / update of the PSR and SSRS as well as their satisfactory closeout traceability throughout the project lifecycle.
• Support the development of the:
• - V&V Process.
• - Assurance evidence gathering for closing out of all the project requirements.
• - Management and coordination of the Verification and Validation deliverables.
• Support closeout of the project Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies, Decisions, Opportunities (RAIDDO) register.
• Evaluates, selects and applies appropriate solutions to low risk/value/complexity engineering problems that improve efficiency or effectiveness, while improving safety and reducing operating costs.
• Makes technical recommendations for own discipline or functional specialism to customers or senior management to inform technical decision making.
• Supports continuous improvement through the use of best practice, innovation, whole life cost optimisation and effective root cause analysis.

Key Interfaces

The Senior System Engineer shall be maintaining collaboration with all disciplines within the projects, especially:

• Head of Systems Integration
• Requirements and V&V Engineers
• System Engineers
• Test and Commissioning Engineers
• Architecture & Interfaces Engineers
• Configuration Management Engineers
• Engineering Simulation and Modelling Engineers
• System Safety Engineers
• RAM Engineers
• Human Factors Engineers
• EMC Engineers
• Software Systems Engineers

The collaboration shall be implemented through formal and informal exchange of information, progress meetings, reports and general discussions. This will involve problem solving, information exchange, lessons learnt and resource management.

Critical working relationships outside of the System Integration team can be summarised as follows:

• Discipline Engineers: covering the railway from Rolling Stock to Infrastructure to enable information exchange and problem solving for the purposes of undertaking system engineering.
• The relevant Project Engineer: for the project technical delivery matters, the receiving and giving of assurance evidence
• The relevant Project Manager: for the project cost, schedule and risk matters to support delivery
• The Project Engineering Manager: for technical assurance matters
• Consultants engaged in System Integration strategy, planning and delivery.
• Other stakeholders and service providers (including emergency services): for the interface and other technical matters.

Knowledge

Good understanding of:

• systems engineering management.
• Railway systems and/ or infrastructure system including system delivery, operation and maintenance.
• Requirements management technique.
• Specification and visualisation of complex systems and processes.
• Systems engineering sub-disciplines: system architecting and modelling.
• interface management and requirements/configuration management.
• Whole life asset management.
• British and International Standards.
• Engineering safety management and its application within transportation.

Skills

• Ability to:
• - Elicit, analyse, level and mange requirements e.g. stakeholder, user, technical
• - Lead production of user and operational requirements
• - Transform requirements into specifications, architectures, and system breakdown.
• - Analyse complex data, draw conclusions, produce reports, and make recommendations to senior management.
• - Build effective working relationships, with people at all levels across the organisation and externally.
• - Work independently with limited guidance and quickly understand complex issues and tasks.
• Capable of:
• - Delivering both heavy infrastructure and complex integrated transport systems at all stages of the project lifecycle
• - Liaising with multiple stakeholders and external parties.

Experience

• Experience of systems engineering and its practical application
• Working experience in at least 2 of the systems engineering sub-disciplines, e.g. system architecting and modelling, interface management and requirements / configuration management
• Experience in planning and applying systems engineering activities on large transport, infrastructure enhancement projects or complex projects.
• Experience in applying systems engineering methods and tools.
• Experience of working in a construction or engineering environment in the railway industry is desirable.