Principal Communications System Test Engineer - Verification and Validation

Austin, TX Engineering – Advanced Product Development /Full-time /On-site

Please Note:

To conform with the United States Government Space Technology Export Regulations, the applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., conditional resident, asylee or refugee (protected individuals as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3)), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

At Cesium Astro, we are developers and pioneers of out-of-the-box communication systems for satellites, UAVs, launch vehicles, and other space and airborne platforms. We take pride in our dynamic and cross-functional work environment, which allows us to learn, develop, and engage across our organization. If you are looking for hands-on, interactive, and autonomous work, Cesium Astro is the place for you.

We are actively seeking passionate, collaborative, energetic, and forward-thinking individuals to join our team.

We are looking to add a Principal Communication System Engineer II to our team. If you enjoy working in a startup environment and are passionate about developing leading-edge phased arrays for satellites, spacecraft, and aerospace systems, we would like to hear from you.

The ideal candidate will have a strong background in space communications, systems engineering, and hands-on RF and digital communication system testing. In this position, you will serve as the technical lead for system integration, test, verification, and validation, with responsibility for demonstrating that our communication systems meet performance requirements and support their intended mission operations. You will own the test strategy from early development through qualification and acceptance, while remaining actively involved in laboratory bring-up, test execution, troubleshooting, and performance characterization.

You will coordinate activities across multidisciplinary engineering teams, identify and resolve technical issues, and communicate test results, risks, and system readiness to program leadership and internal stakeholders. The successful candidate will communicate effectively with team members and internal stakeholders, both verbally and through written content.

JOB DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES Lead communication system integration and test. Define and execute test strategies across components, subsystems, phased-array payloads, and end-to-end communication links, including interfaces with ground systems. Develop verification and validation plans. Translate system requirements and mission concepts of operations (CONOPS) into testable acceptance criteria, test cases, and operational scenarios. Maintain traceability between requirements, test procedures, results, and verification closure.

Own hands-on system bring-up and troubleshooting. Integrate RF hardware, antennas, digital processing, FPGA firmware, software, modems, and data interfaces. Diagnose and resolve issues that affect system functionality, interoperability, and performance. Develop automated test capabilities. Create and maintain test scripts, software, procedures, and data-analysis tools to support repeatable characterization, regression testing, qualification, and acceptance testing. Characterize RF and communication-link performance. Measure and analyze transmit power, receiver sensitivity, gain, noise figure, linearity, modulation quality, spectral performance, and bit/packet error rates.

Compare measured results with link budgets, gain lineups, cascade analyses, and system models. Verify phased-array performance. Develop and execute conducted and over-the-air tests to evaluate beam steering, beam-pointing accuracy, radiation patterns, sidelobes, polarization, and performance across frequency, scan angle, and operating conditions. Validate modem and data-layer operation. Test configurations, interoperability, synchronization, throughput, latency, and error recovery under nominal, degraded, and boundary conditions.

Develop representative test environments. Define and configure laboratory test benches, hardware-in-the-loop setups, and channel-emulation capabilities to evaluate system behavior under mission-representative conditions, including attenuation, propagation delay, Doppler, and interference. Lead failure analysis and corrective-action verification. Investigate anomalies, isolate root causes across hardware and software interfaces, document findings, and verify corrective actions through targeted testing and regression coverage.…