Radar Systems Engineer - RF Integration and Test Engineer

Radar Systems Engineer - RF Integration and Test Engineer

Hawthorne, California, United States

CHAOS Industries is redefining modern defense with a multi-product portfolio that gives the ultimate advantage—domain dominance. The company's products are powered by Coherent Distributed Networks (CDN™), empowering warfighters, commercial air operators, and border protection teams to act faster, adapt rapidly, and stay ahead of evolving threats.

• Own RF-centric integration, debug, characterization, and validation for radar hardware, subsystems, and test environments
• Serve as the Integration and Test team's lead RF engineer across lab, production, chamber, and field environments — ensuring RF chains and test setups produce trustworthy measurements and enable rapid root-cause isolation

• Lead RF debug, characterization, and acceptance for radar hardware — transmit chains, receive chains, antennas, cables, adapters, switches, filters, LNAs, HPAs, SDRs, and frequency conversion stages — including qualifying new components for integration into radar systems
• Diagnose RF failures by selecting and executing the appropriate measurements — S-parameters, VSWR, noise figure, phase noise, IP3/P1dB, gain/compression, group delay, harmonics/spurs, isolation, and time-domain — and reconcile component-level results against system-level performance such as detection range, sensitivity, and calibration accuracy
• Choose the right instrument for the failure mode — VNAs, spectrum analyzers, signal generators, phase noise analyzers, power meters, oscilloscopes, noise figure analyzers, and supporting calibration standards
• Isolate subtle RF issues such as insertion loss drift, intermittent behavior, phase instability, spurious content, compression effects, LO leakage, and timing/frequency drift
• Define, configure, and calibrate RF test setups so measurements are repeatable and representative of system operating conditions
• Determine whether an observed failure is caused by component defect, cable/connector/interface degradation, calibration error, fixture/setup limitation, environmental effect, or broader system interaction — and connect those measurement results back to radar-level performance impacts
• Partner with systems, hardware, software, firmware, and integration engineers to root-cause failures that span RF, digital, timing, and test-setup boundaries
• Create RF test procedures, acceptance criteria, troubleshooting guides, and characterization reports that technicians and engineers can execute repeatably
• Plan and execute phased array testing in our anechoic chamber, including EIRP, transmit and receive beam patterns, sidelobe levels, beam steering accuracy, element-level calibration, and array calibration verification across the operating band
• Stand up and improve RF portions of test racks, bench setups, and STE environments — including automated or semi‑automated RF data collection, analysis, and reporting
• Work 5 days per week out of our office in Los Angeles (Hawthorne), California

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Physics, Applied Physics, or another related technical field, or equivalent hands‑on RF test experience
• 5+ years of experience in RF test, RF integration, RF validation, radar systems, wireless systems, aerospace/defense systems, or a similar high‑performance RF environment
• Strong hands‑on experience using RF test equipment to debug hardware and characterize components and subsystems
• Strong understanding of RF fundamentals including scattering parameters, impedance matching, gain, noise figure, linearity, compression, isolation, phase stability, and frequency-domain behavior
• Experience designing and executing RF test plans and interpreting ambiguous measurement results
• Ability to connect component-level measurements to system-level behavior and performance degradation
• Strong documentation and communication skills, including the ability to explain RF issues clearly to cross‑functional teams
• High attention to detail and disciplined lab/test practices

• Experience with radar systems, phased array systems, EW systems, SATCOM systems, or other advanced…