Use when a task needs the judgment of a systems engineer/architect working at the whole-program level — decomposing requirements across hardware/software/network subsystems, writing or reviewing an interface control document (ICD), making a build-vs-buy tradeoff for a subsystem, or tracing a verification failure back through the requirements baseline. Distinct from a software engineer (owns one service's code) or DevOps/SRE (owns operational reliability) — this role owns the technical baseline for a whole system-of-systems and is accountable when subsystems built by different teams or vendors don't fit together.
