Specialist, RF Electrical Engineer

Acron Aviation designs, engineers, and manufactures certified avionics systems that support safety-critical flight operations across commercial and military aviation. Within Avionics, the Surveillance product line develops and sustains systems that enable aircraft awareness, collision avoidance, and airspace interoperability. Our portfolio includes TCAS, Mode S transponders, ADS-B, and integrated surveillance solutions deployed across commercial, military, and rotorcraft platforms.

About the role

The Specialist RF Engineer is a key contributor to new design activity (requirements analysis, component selection, schematic capture, layout) as well as supporting existing products within the product portfolio. This role works within the ACSS (Surveillance) product line, designing and supporting ACAS/TCAS, transponder, DME, UAT, and other RF functions. The office location for this role is Phoenix, Arizona, or Grand Rapids, Michigan, for full-time, in-person work.

Responsibilities

• Derive RF hardware requirements from system level specifications.
• Detail functional blocks to support surveillance system architectures.
• Perform RF/analog circuit design and hardware engineering from the component level up to entire systems.
• Support detailed design, analysis, development, and testing of hardware.
• Design for and support DO-160 and/or MIL-STD qualification of RF electronics (environmental, EMI/EMC).
• Conduct and participate in internal and external system design reviews.
• Present concepts, designs, actionable information, and results to program management and Acron Aviation customers.
• Lead or work in conjunction with mechanical, systems, and software engineering to meet challenging performance requirements.
• Support internal peer design reviews, design verification testing of engineering units, and oversight of design through production.
• Develop methods for modifying systems to include new RF and wireless capabilities.

Good verbal, written communication, and excellent analytical skills are essential for this position. Ability to work independently, as well as contribute to the work of multi-disciplinary engineering teams to ensure the successful development of RF systems and assemblies.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree and minimum 4 years of prior relevant experience, or Graduate Degree and a minimum of 2 years of prior related experience.
• Minimum of 4 years of RF design experience for fielded products, with preference for commercial avionics applications.
• Academic background in electro-magnetic (EM) and RF/microwave theory.

Skills

• Experience designing RF CCAs operating at frequencies ranging from UHF through E-band, but with focus in L-band (1GHz). Design activities include frequency synthesizers, up/down converters, front-end electronics, and other RF electronics.
• Experience with simulation and/or 3D modeling tools such as HFSS, AWR Microwave Office, and/or ADS.
• Understanding of critical performance characteristics of passive and active RF components such as ADCs, DACs, Amplifiers, Oscillators, Attenuators, Mixers, and Filters. An understanding of how these characteristics relate to a system's performance is a plus.
• Working understanding and knowledge of S-parameters (matching networks, cascade analysis, …), Gain budget analysis (Gain, NF, Linearity, Noise power, …), and Filtering (types, bandwidth, implementations, …).
• A strong understanding of noise figure/noise temperature (Eb/No, BER vs. noise, receiver sensitivity, and expected value and variance), temperature effects, interconnection (standard and non-standard impedances), and isolation requirements.