Director of System Architecture - Connected Water Metering Products

Position Summary

As the Director of Systems Architecture, you will own the end-to-end technical architecture for Neptune's connected water metering products, spanning meter firmware, RF and cellular gateway collectors, cloud headend services, APIs, and supporting IT infrastructure.

This position involves bridging product, security, and manufacturing engineering to bring new connected devices from concept to certified, deployed product.

You will author and maintain system-level specifications, design PKI and security architecture for device identity at manufacturing scale, define verification and validation strategies, and serve as the technical authority across firmware, software, hardware, and DevSecOps teams.

This role reports to the CTO and provides direct impact on Neptune's product roadmap, platform security posture, and manufacturing readiness.

Objectives


* End-to-End System Architecture: Define and maintain the holistic system architecture spanning water meter firmware, RF/cellular gateway collectors, cloud headend services, APIs, and supporting IT infrastructure.

Identify and resolve cross-domain interfaces and integration points early in the product lifecycle.


* Product and System Specifications: Author and maintain system-level specifications for new product development, including system requirements specifications (SRS), interface control documents (ICDs), hardware/firmware/software architecture documents, and operational concepts.

Ensure traceability from customer requirements through design to test.


* PKI, Certificate, and Key Management: Design and specify the end-to-end PKI and key management architecture for device identity, covering device certificate provisioning during manufacturing, secure key injection processes, certificate lifecycle management, trust hierarchies (root CA, intermediate CA, device certificates), secure boot chain-of-trust, firmware signing, and code signing for distributed mobile and desktop applications.

Define manufacturing-line integration specifications to ensure cryptographic material is provisioned correctly and auditably at scale.


* Product Security Architecture: Establish and enforce security architecture across the product stack, including secure boot, authenticated and encrypted OTA firmware update, mutual TLS for device-to-cloud communication, secure element and TEE integration where applicable, and headend access controls.

Support threat modeling and drive security requirements into design across firmware, software, and infrastructure teams.


* Verification and Validation: Define and own a disciplined system verification and validation strategy in which every customer and system requirement is explicitly tied to a test that proves it works, from unit and integration tests at the component level through subsystem qualification, full system testing, and end-to-end field acceptance.

Drive the creation of test specifications across firmware, software, RF communication, hea...