Andean cosmology divides the world into three: hanan pacha above, kay pacha here, and ukhu pacha below. Each has an animal. The condor belongs to the upper world, the puma to this one, and the snake to the world underneath, and the three appear together often enough in Inca and pre-Inca work that the grouping is a standard reading.
The condor's job in that scheme is transport. It carries messages and offerings upward to the apus, the mountain lords, and to the sun, and it is the form a soul may take on the way. The bird's actual habits support the reading better than most such correspondences do: it soars for hours without a wingbeat at altitudes where nothing else flies, and it is visible from the valley floor as a shape that belongs to the peaks rather than to the ground.
It is older than the Inca. Condors appear on Moche ceramics and among the Nazca geoglyphs, and the bird is common in Chavin and Paracas work. The Inca inherited it rather than invented it, which is the pattern for most of what the empire is credited with.
The bird's modern position is uncomfortable. It is a national symbol in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and it is close to extinction in parts of that range, poisoned and shot as a supposed threat to livestock that it very rarely is.