Lead Radar Instrument Engineer (Aerospace)

Location: Long Beach, California, United States; hybrid role.

Hiring range: $175,000–$263,000 USD per year, plus salary and equity.

Company

hirify.global develops rockets, including the Terran R vehicle, and builds spacecraft and launch systems for commercial and scientific missions.

What you will do

• Own the vehicle-level system design for radar electronics, signal processing, and antenna systems operating in sounder and radiometer modes.
• Develop instrument performance, power and mass budgets, link budgets, and SNR and penetration-depth analyses.
• Lead waveform trade studies with science partners, implement waveforms and baseline algorithms, and co-design the instrument against mission science objectives.
• Lead prototype and brass-board hardware development, validation, calibration planning, and coordination across RF, digital, power, mechanical, firmware, and software disciplines.
• Lead qualification and acceptance testing, spacecraft integration, terrestrial analog flight testing, test integration, and post-flight data review.
• Perform spectrum licensing and frequency coordination, and support calibration and on-orbit commissioning.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in electrical hardware development, including software-defined radios, radar transceivers, or sophisticated digital processors.
• Ability to develop and manage radar system performance budgets.
• Experience analyzing and modeling radar returns and radar performance.
• Experience implementing radio or radar transceivers as software-defined radios.
• Experience with field testing, flight testing, or spaceflight involving radio or radar transceivers.
• Deep expertise in one or more of the following: signal-processing chains in FPGA and/or GPU processing; mixed-signal and digital PCB design, including software-defined radios or board-level FPGA designs; RF circuit design including power amplifiers, low-noise amplifiers, and filters; or antenna design and verification.

Nice to have

• Experience with microwave radiometry or radiometer instrument design.
• Familiarity with planetary or terrestrial radars, including SHARAD, MARSIS, RIMFAX, or ice-penetrating radar.
• Hands-on experience with AMD/Xilinx RFSoC or Zynq UltraScale+ platforms.
• Experience with spectrum licensing and frequency coordination for experimental or space systems.
• Experience with polarimetric radar and full-polarimetry calibration.
• Experience taking RF payloads through PDR/CDR, qualification, and spacecraft integration.

Culture & Benefits

• Work with autonomy, ownership, and responsibility for high-impact aerospace systems.
• Collaborate across propulsion, manufacturing, software, avionics, science, and other disciplines.
• Competitive salary and equity.
• Generous PTO and sick leave, parental leave, and an annual learning and development stipend.
• Equal opportunity employment and reasonable accommodation support.