RF Design Engineer

The opportunity is with an early-stage space company building advanced electronically-steerable radar payloads for Low Earth Orbit. As a principal-level RF/microwave engineer, you will own the flight-ready, phase-coherent RF hardware that determines the payload's sensitivity, power, waveform fidelity, and overall mission performance.

About the Role

This is a deeply hands-on principal role where you will own RF hardware end-to-end—from architecture and budgets through circuit and PCB design, simulation, lab characterization, integration, qualification, calibration, and production readiness.

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

The team is growing, with opportunities for senior RF engineers across two focus areas:

• Transmit focus: High-power amplification (GaN SSPA and drain-switching approaches), peak RF power, PAE, AM/PM fidelity, bandwidth, and thermal/mechanical complexity. This is the rarer, more senior profile and the current priority.
• Receive focus: Sensitivity, dynamic range, channel matching, gain and noise budgets, and calibration stability.

Strong candidates often bring depth in one area and working knowledge of the other. If your expertise is in high-power transmit, the team especially wants to hear from you.

Responsibilities

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

Requirements

• Expert RF/microwave design experience across transmit and/or receive chains, including RF budgets, gain and noise analysis, linearity, dynamic range, phase noise, coherence, high-power amplification, filtering, matching networks, microwave PCB design, RF simulation, lab characterization, and calibration.
• Experience developing space-qualified hardware, ideally with exposure to phased arrays, radar payloads, or aerospace RF systems.
• Proven track record of personally architecting and delivering complex RF/microwave hardware from requirements through bring-up, characterization, integration, and qualification, with end-to-end ownership.
• Hands-on, rigorous, and curious mindset with strong first-principles judgment, disciplined lab habits, and comfort with ambiguity.
• Ability to mentor while remaining a strong individual contributor.

Practical Details

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

Honest Preview

The role offers exceptional ownership of advanced radar hardware, exposure to genuinely hard RF problems, rapid design-test cycles, and direct impact on flight hardware and mission performance. Challenges include 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.