Senior Radio Frequency Design Engineer

RF Engineer (Satellite Navigation Payloads & Receivers)

Location: Northern Virginia (Washington DC metro), on-site

Type: Permanent, full time

Eligibility: US Citizen or Green Card holder

The Company

A venture-backed space company building the first fully commercial satellite navigation service, a complete alternative to legacy GPS designed from a clean sheet.

Positioning underpins almost everything in modern life, yet the incumbent system is slow to fix, unencrypted, and trivially jammed or spoofed. That is not good enough for the applications coming next: autonomous vehicles, drone logistics, urban air mobility, augmented reality, and safety-critical government timing. This business exists to fix it, delivering higher accuracy, dramatically faster time to first fix, and genuine anti-jam and anti-spoof protection.

The architecture spans a constellation of small satellites, a global ground station network, and next generation receiver technology. The GNSS hardware, software and services market sits at roughly $260 billion a year, and the company intends to take a serious share of it.

The Role

This is an RF-led hardware seat. You will own the radio chain across the full PNT stack, from the transmit payload on orbit through to the ground station receive path and the next generation user receiver. Front ends, RFICs, antennas, filtering, link budgets, and the board-level electrical design that carries all of it.

The company wants someone whose instinct is RF but who is entirely comfortable owning the wider electrical design rather than throwing it over a fence. You will work directly alongside the Chief Engineer and the wider engineering group, turning proprietary satellite and RF technology into hardware that flies and hardware that ships.

This is an early engineering hire. The company is explicit that the path to manager and director level is open and short for the right person.

What you will be doing

• Designing and developing RF front ends and signal chains for space payloads, ground stations and receiver hardware
• Selecting and integrating RFICs, LNAs, PAs, mixers, synthesisers, filtering and antennas, then proving the performance in the lab
• Owning RF performance analysis: link budgets, noise figure, gain and phase, spurious and harmonics, EVM, sensitivity and interference rejection
• Designing analogue, RF and digital PCBs, including layout partitioning, grounding, shielding and controlled-impedance routing for high frequency work
• Managing the boundary between the RF front end and the digital back end, including high-speed ADC and DAC interfacing and clocking
• Defining the test approach and validating it through simulation, bench characterisation, hardware in the loop and field demonstration
• Working with software defined radios and RF test equipment (VNAs, spectrum and signal analysers, signal generators) day to day
• Supporting productisation as technology moves from prototype to a manufacturable product, including design for test and design for manufacture
• Supporting the operations team on system commissioning, operations automation, and anomaly investigation and resolution
• Working with engineering and commercial teams to pull out and pin down requirements

What you will need

• BS in Electrical Engineering or a closely related discipline (MS preferred)
• 3 to 5 years designing RF hardware for GNSS, space, satcom or wireless communications
• Demonstrable RF front end design experience, taking a signal chain from architecture through schematic, board and bring-up to measured performance
• Solid analogue and digital PCB design capability alongside the RF work
• Working understanding of RFICs, FPGAs, SoCs and antenna behaviour
• Hands-on experience with software defined radios and RF test and measurement
• Genuine strength in problem solving and the underlying maths and physics
• Familiarity with newspace satellite and payload technology
• Self-directed, comfortable operating without close supervision
• Clear, confident written and verbal communication, and organised working habits
• US Citizenship or Permanent Resident status
• Willingness to travel up to 10%

Nice to have

• GNSS-specific RF experience, whether payload transmit chains or receiver front ends
• Experience with RF simulation and EM tools
• Exposure to modern wireless standards (4G, 5G, WiFi, SATCOM, IoT)
• Familiarity with mainstream SoC and FPGA toolchains and development environments
• Space environment design experience: radiation, thermal vacuum, qualification and screening
• Previous startup experience
• Active US security clearance

The kind of person who does well here

Someone who genuinely enjoys the startup setting rather than tolerating it. Positive, straightforward communicator with a sense of humour. Thinks strategically but executes tactically. Comfortable working across every function in the business, not just engineering. Happy to roll sleeves up and get stuck into whatever the week demands.