RF Design Engineer
Principal RF/Microwave Engineer — Spaceborne Radar Payloads
About the opportunity
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.
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.
The mission context
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.
The two profiles
The team is growing, and there's appetite for more than one senior RF engineer. The work splits across two chains:
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.
A receive focus, centred on sensitivity, dynamic range, channel matching, gain and noise budgets, and calibration stability.
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.
What you'll own
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.
A typical week
Roughly 60% design, simulation, and lab work, 20% integration and support, and 20% in meetings. This is a bench-heavy role by design.
What you'll bring
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.
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.
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.
Practical requirements
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.
The honest preview
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.