Principal RF/DSP Engineer (Counter-UAS)

Location: Leesburg, VA, United States. Full-time onsite role. U.S. Citizenship is required due to contract and ITAR/EAR requirements.

Salary: $153,500–$234,250 per year.

Company

hirify.global develops autonomous defense systems and technologies across air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains.

What you will do

• Investigate unfamiliar RF targets from complex-IQ recordings by generating hypotheses, designing controlled experiments, and validating conclusions.
• Characterize waveforms and develop algorithms for burst detection, synchronization, demodulation, protocol recovery, classification, and tracking.
• Improve line-of-bearing capabilities through antenna-array signal processing, bearing estimation, calibration, and field performance analysis.
• Build reusable synchronization libraries, synthetic-waveform and impairment-injection frameworks, replay fixtures, and validation harnesses.
• Implement and optimize production DSP components in modern C++ and validate them using synthetic, conducted, over-the-air, and field-recorded data.
• Provide day-to-day technical leadership to signal-processing engineers and collaborate with RF, FPGA, embedded software, data science, test, and mission teams.

Requirements

• BS or higher in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Applied Physics, or a related technical field.
• Substantial professional experience developing RF, communications, radar, electronic-warfare, or related signal-processing systems.
• Strong DSP and digital-communications fundamentals, including detection and estimation, filtering, FFT analysis, synchronization, modulation, and channel coding.
• Hands-on experience analyzing real complex-IQ data and implementing, testing, and debugging DSP algorithms.
• Production-quality C++ development in Linux, automated testing, recorded-data replay, and Git-based collaboration.
• Hands-on direction-finding and antenna-array signal-processing experience is required, including bearing estimation on multichannel data, array calibration, and mitigation of mutual coupling, channel mismatch, and multipath.

Nice to have

• Reverse-engineering undocumented wireless waveforms or protocols into fielded capabilities.
• Software-defined radios, RF laboratory equipment, conducted or over-the-air testing, and Counter-UAS, electronic-warfare, SIGINT, or radar experience.
• FPGA-based DSP, fixed-point implementation, real-time C++ optimization, SIMD, threading, and high-rate sample transport.
• Frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum, OFDM, cellular, telemetry, command-and-control, RF classification, or emitter-geolocation experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Mission-focused work developing defense technology and autonomous systems.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401(k) with company matching.
• 9/80 work schedule and paid holiday shutdown.
• Access to information governed by ITAR/EAR export-control requirements.