Senior Radio Frequency Design Engineer

Job Description

About the opportunity

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An early-stage space company is building advanced electronically-steerable radar payloads for Low Earth Orbit, and needs a principal-level RF/microwave engineer to own one of the highest-leverage parts of the architecture: the flight-ready, phase-coherent RF hardware that determines the payload's sensitivity, power, waveform fidelity, and overall mission performance.

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This is a deeply hands-on principal role, not a systems-only or simulation-only seat. You'll own RF hardware end-to-end, from architecture and budgets through circuit and PCB design, simulation, lab characterisation, integration, qualification, calibration, and production readiness.

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The mission context

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The company's radar technology is based on mature phased-array heritage already in full-rate production for terrestrial and airborne applications, now being transitioned to flight-ready space hardware. The RF payload is central to that, and this role directly influences system sensitivity, RF power, efficiency, coherence, and mission performance. You'd be shaping next-generation spaceborne ISR, SAR, and MTI capabilities.

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The two profiles

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The team is growing, and there's appetite for more than one senior RF engineer. The work splits across two chains:

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A transmit focus, centred on high-power amplification (GaN SSPA and drain-switching approaches), peak RF power, PAE, AM/PM fidelity, bandwidth, and the thermal and mechanical complexity that comes with high-power transmit. This is the rarer, more senior profile and the current priority.

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A receive focus, centred on sensitivity, dynamic range, channel matching, gain and noise budgets, and calibration stability.

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Strong candidates often bring depth in one and working knowledge of the other. If your centre of gravity is high-power transmit, we especially want to hear from you.

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What you'll own

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Own the RF architecture and performance budgets. Design and verify RF transmit and/or receive chains spanning digital interfaces, RF signal conditioning, amplification, filtering, and calibration. Retire RF, thermal, power, EMI/EMC, and integration risks. Collaborate across antenna, digital, power, and spacecraft disciplines. Transition qualified hardware into repeatable production.

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A typical week

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Roughly 60% design, simulation, and lab work, 20% integration and support, and 20% in meetings. This is a bench-heavy role by design.

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What you'll bring

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Expert RF/microwave design experience across transmit and/or receive chains: RF budgets, gain and noise analysis, linearity, dynamic range, phase noise, coherence, high-power amplification, filtering, matching networks, microwave PCB design, RF simulation, lab characterisation, and calibration. Experience developing space-qualified hardware, and ideally exposure to phased arrays, radar payloads, or aerospace RF systems.

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The thing that matters most: you've personally architected and delivered complex RF/microwave hardware from requirements through bring-up, characterisation, integration, and qualification, and owned it end-to-end. Engineers who've played across disciplines, tried things, hit problems, and iterated their way through are exactly the profile. Deep but narrow experience, owning one fixed slice of a chain for years without that broader ownership, is not what this role needs.

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You're hands-on, rigorous, curious, and high-ownership, with strong first-principles judgement, disciplined lab habits, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to mentor while remaining a strong individual contributor.

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Practical requirements

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This is an on-site role in the Seattle area. Given the mission set, US citizenship and the ability to meet security clearance requirements are required.

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The honest preview

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The upside is exceptional ownership of advanced radar hardware, genuinely hard RF problems, rapid design-test cycles, and direct impact on flight hardware and mission performance. The hard parts are aggressive schedules, evolving requirements, tightly coupled multidisciplinary interfaces, space-qualification constraints, and the expectation to solve problems hands-on at the bench. It suits a builder who wants deep ownership, not a specialist looking to run one narrow slice.