A NATO organisation in Braine-l'Alleud is looking for a principal solution engineer to lead the architecture of complex communications solutions — the deployable, dispersible and highly mobile kind, where power, wireless and satellite all have to work together in the field. This is a senior post: you would set the standards other projects build to.

What you would be doing

• Leading the development of architectures for complex solutions and keeping them consistent with agreed requirements.
• Setting the policies, principles and practices for selecting solution architecture components.
• Managing trade-offs between functional, service quality and systems management requirements, and communicating the decisions to stakeholders.
• Coordinating the target architecture across several projects at once, keeping the design stable and standards-compliant.
• Driving scoping, requirements definition and prioritisation on large initiatives — establishing baselines, negotiating competing priorities, and managing changes properly.
• Setting systems development policy and making security and privacy integral to it, and managing the resources, technical, financial and quality targets across all stages.
• Producing or approving network architectures, topologies and configuration databases, and specifying design parameters for connectivity, capacity, speed, interfacing, security and access.
• Assessing network risk and specifying recovery routines and contingency procedures, with design views for each stakeholder group.

What they are looking for

• A Master's degree in a related discipline with five years of relevant experience, or a Bachelor's with eight.
• Proven experience leading teams of technical staff.
• Current and future deployable, dispersible and highly mobile CIS technologies.
• Design and systems integration experience covering AC power distribution, emergency generation and fuel storage, and UPS.
• A good grasp of wireless technologies including satellite communications.
• Architecture modelling languages — UML, SysML or ArchiMate — preferably inside an architecture framework (NAFv4, TOGAF, DODAF, Zachman) and model-based systems engineering.
• Quality assurance practice, and solid experience developing, implementing, fielding, testing and maintaining modern communications equipment.
• ITIL Foundation and PRINCE2 Foundation (or an equivalent project management certification such as PMP).

Nice to have

• NATO Architecture Framework version 4, and Federated Mission Networking applied in service design.
• PRINCE2 Practitioner or equivalent, and ArchiMate or TOGAF certification.
• An international environment with both military and civilian colleagues.

Practical detail

• Braine-l'Alleud, Belgium — full time on site, normal office environment, with temporary duty to other NATO sites in Belgium one to two times a month.
• 28 September to 30 December 2026, 488 hours in total.
• Graded at the equivalent of NATO G20.
• You must hold a valid clearance and be a citizen of a NATO member country with the right to work in Belgium.

If you have taken deployable communications from a requirement to something that actually works in the field, this is a role with real scope.