RF Antenna Engineer (m/w/d)

Allot of Aether 1 relies on the range and resilience of the aperture. Today those antennas are bought in, specified against datasheets that were never written for our frequency plan. Your mandate is twofold. Optimizing the existing set-up and eventually designing them ourselves, for our bands, for our platforms.

You start with our passive antennas: the linear and circular, directional and omnidirectional elements our air and ground units need and build the in-house design, simulation and measurement capability behind them. From that foundation, you take on our phased array project: electronically steered beamforming for narrow beams, longer reach and jamming resistance. You are not just joining an antenna team. You are set to build much of the function.

What you'll do

• Design, simulate and validate passive antennas across our operating bands - linear and circular polarisation, directional and omnidirectional variants.
• Replace bought-in parts with our own designs: reference designs, simulation models, measurement baselines, and the supplier and manufacturing path behind them.
• Own antenna-to-platform integration: mounting, ground planes, radomes, pattern distortion, and isolation between our two independent RF chains.
• Recover the link budget margin a generic catalogue antenna leaves behind, and quantify it.
• Build our phased array capability: element design and spacing, mutual coupling, feed networks, calibration, and digital beam steering co-designed with our FPGA/DSP team.
• Prove everything on hardware - chamber characterisation first, then flight test in interference-heavy and GNSS-degraded conditions.
• Define production and acceptance test methodology so an in-house antenna is repeatable, not a one-off.

What we're looking for

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in electrical engineering, physics, or a related discipline.
• 3+ years in antenna design, in industry or research, with hardware you personally took from simulation through measurement to a working system.
• Practical experience designing passive elements - patch, monopole, dipole, helical or conformal - in both linear and circular polarisation.
• Fluency with full-wave EM simulation (HFSS, CST, FEKO or equivalent), and the lab discipline to correlate it against real measurement.
• Strong grounding in impedance matching, S-parameters, polarisation and axial ratio, mutual coupling, efficiency and link budgets.
• Hands-on measurement ownership: VNA, near-field or anechoic chamber, pattern and gain characterisation.

Bonus: not required

• Practical phased array and beamforming experience - arrays you have built and measured, analogue, digital or hybrid.
• CRPA principles and adaptive nulling for GNSS anti-jam and anti-spoof.
• Adaptive array algorithms in a DSP or FPGA context.
• Experience moving a component from bought-in to in-house, including qualification and manufacturing.
• RF PCB and feed network layout in Altium or equivalent.
• UAV or airborne platform integration; testing in contested spectrum.