Technical Advisor – Seeker Design and Manufacturing

Location:

Northern VA (On-site)

Experience:

5+ years postgraduate experience

Clearance:

U.S. Citizenship & Active Top Secret (TS) clearance are required.

MACH-20 is seeking a Technical Advisor to support advanced seeker development programs spanning seeker architecture, performance analysis, producibility, manufacturing scale‑up, and industrial base assessment. This role is focused on providing high‑end technical insight and independent assessment across the lifecycle of RF and multi‑mode seekers, with particular emphasis on producible, tactically effective systems that can scale beyond low‑volume exquisite solutions.

The ideal candidate combines strong technical expertise in RF seeker hardware and systems engineering with an understanding of how those designs transition into manufacturable, affordable, and scalable production systems. Experience bridging developmental programs, production engineering, industrial base realities, and operational performance trades is highly desired.

This is a SETA/advisory role. The position does not require direct hands‑on design ownership but does require sufficient technical depth to assess architectures, challenge assumptions, evaluate trade studies, and advise government stakeholders across technical and programmatic decision spaces. An active Top Secret clearance is required on day one.

The ideal candidate is a systems-oriented technical advisor capable of connecting: component‑level hardware realities, seeker performance, calibration and test burden, manufacturing scalability, industrial base constraints, and unit cost at scale.

We recognize that candidates possessing deep expertise across all desired areas are exceptionally rare. As such, rather than mastery of every individual area. the strongest candidates may demonstrate a combination of:

• manufacturing and industrialization experience,
• production‑scale electronics insight,
• and mission‑performance trade analysis.

Required

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, physics, applied mathematics, or related technical field
• Experience supporting advanced sensor, seeker, RF, or guidance system programs
• Ability to assess complex technical trade spaces and communicate findings to government stakeholders
• Familiarity with defense acquisition, developmental programs, or advanced technology transitions

Preferred

• Experience with RF seeker systems
• Experience with multi‑mode seeker architectures
• Experience supporting developmental test and evaluation
• Experience with production engineering or manufacturing scale‑up
• Experience with commercial electronics manufacturing environments
• Experience performing techno‑economic or production scaling analyses
• Experience evaluating industrial base capabilities and constraints
• Advanced degree in relevant technical discipline
• Experience supporting classified programs and rapid prototyping efforts

Seeker Architecture and Hardware

• Desired experience includes active and passive RF, EO/IR, multi‑spectral sensing approaches.
• Familiarity with seeker subsystems and component technologies such as antennas and apertures, RF front ends, transmitters & receivers, signal processors, analog‑to‑digital conversion, digital back ends, SWaP, embedded processing architectures, calibration architectures, guidance, navigation, &discrimination functions.
• Experience evaluating technical trades between performance, complexity, cost, size, power, manufacturability, and production scalability is highly valued

Algorithms and Software

• Familiarity with detection/tracking algorithms, signal processing & discrimination techniques, navigation & targeting, sensor fusion, multi‑mode seeker processing, real‑time…