Principal Systems Engineer

Are you the kind of person who cannot stop at understanding how a system works, but wants to know how it could work fundamentally better? Do you enjoy connecting the dots across hardware, embedded software, algorithms, and application software? Do you challenge established assumptions, explore new system architectures, and see opportunities beyond the boundaries of traditional motion capture? If you are driven by complex problems, curious about what is possible, and excited to shape systems from the ground up, we’d love to have you! 

Who is Xsens

Xsens is a leading full-stack provider of sensors, software, and analytics that enable the digitization of movement. Xsens serves the entertainment, health & sports, and automation & mobility markets. Our innovations enable our customers to capitalize on the value of movement by transforming data into meaningful and actionable insights. Partnering with leading global brands such as Electronic Arts, EPIC Games, 20th Century Studios, Netflix, Toyota, Siemens, and over 1000 sports organizations/research centers/universities, Xsens is creating extraordinary outcomes that move humanity forward. Xsens is a portfolio company of Francisco Partners, visit www.xsens.com to learn more.

Your role as a Principal Software at Xsens

As Principal Systems Engineer, you are the senior technical thinker who connects the engineering disciplines at Xsens and makes the whole system work as one. You look beyond individual components and subsystems. Your focus is the technical coherence, behavior, and performance of the complete product and how to make it fundamentally better.

You work across hardware, embedded software, algorithms, application software and external platforms. You identify dependencies and trade-offs early, define critical interfaces and help teams optimize the complete product rather than for their individual domain. 

We are looking for someone intensely curious, someone who challenges assumptions and explores how robotics, AI, edge computing, cloud and other high-tech domains can shape the next generation of Xsens technology. You combine that curiosity with a pragmatic, hands-on can-do mentality. You do not just explore what could be possible; you help turn it into something that works.

This is a hybrid role based in Enschede, the Netherlands, with flexibility to work partially from home. Regular on-site presence is expected as you will work closely with multidisciplinary engineering teams and physical products. 
 
Key responsibilities:

• Own and evolve end-to-end system architecture and system behavior

• Connect the dots across hardware, embedded software, algorithms and application software into coherent products and platforms

• Define critical system interfaces and budgets including latency, compute, bandwidth, power, thermal performance and synchronization

• Identify cross-domain dependencies, technical risks and architectural trade-offs early

• Lead system-level design reviews and drive decisions that optimize the complete system

• Work closely with the Software Architect and domain leads to establish clear technical boundaries and interfaces

• Dive into complex multidisciplinary problems and support root-cause analysis across system layers

• Challenge established assumptions and bring in relevant approaches from adjacent technologies and industries

• Explore future architectures for robotics, physical AI, simulation, edge and cloud applications

• Turn new ideas into practical experiments, prototypes and scalable technical solutions

• Create technical clarity that enables engineering teams to move independently and faster