Lead Radar Engineer, Mars Orbiter (Radar)

Location: Hybrid role in Long Beach, California, United States

Salary: $175,000–$263,000 USD annually

Company

hirify.global develops rockets and space systems, including the Terran R launch vehicle and interplanetary science missions.

What you will do

• Own the vehicle-level system design for a wideband UHF radar electronics, signal processing chain, and antenna system supporting sounder and radiometer modes.
• Develop instrument performance, power, mass, link, signal-to-noise ratio, and penetration-depth budgets and analyses.
• Lead waveform trade studies and co-design the instrument with science partners to meet mission science objectives.
• Lead prototype and flight-hardware development, including brass-board validation and coordination across RF, digital, power, mechanical, firmware, and software disciplines.
• Define calibration schemes and lead qualification, acceptance testing, spacecraft integration, terrestrial analog flight testing, and post-flight data review.
• Perform spectrum licensing and frequency coordination and support on-orbit commissioning.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in electrical hardware development involving software-defined radios, radar transceivers, or sophisticated digital processors.
• Demonstrated ability to develop and manage radar system performance budgets and analyze radar returns and performance.
• Experience implementing radio or radar transceivers as software-defined radios.
• Field testing, flight testing, or spaceflight experience with radio or radar transceivers.
• Deep expertise in at least one of signal-processing chains in FPGA or GPU, mixed-signal and digital PCB design, RF circuit design, or antenna design and verification.

Nice to have

• Experience with microwave radiometry, radiometer instruments, planetary radars, polarimetric radar, or full-polarimetry calibration.
• Familiarity with AMD/Xilinx RFSoC or Zynq UltraScale+ platforms.
• Experience with spectrum licensing, frequency coordination, PDR/CDR, qualification, and spacecraft integration for RF payloads.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• Generous paid time off and sick leave.
• Parental leave.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Autonomous, cross-functional work with ownership and technical responsibility across the instrument lifecycle.