Principal RF Engineer

Company Overview

Metrea delivers effects-as-a-service to national security partners across five domains and more than a dozen mission areas. These include airborne ISR, electronic warfare, secure communications, aerial refueling, special air missions, aerial firefighting, and advanced simulation. We own the whole stack: designing, building, and operating turnkey capabilities that give our partners decisive, asymmetric advantage against rapidly evolving threats.

Electromagnetic and Cyber Group (EM&C) is responsible for developing flexible and survivable advanced electronic warfare and secure communications equipment while providing the industry’s leading signals intelligence, electronic warfare, and cyber experts.

Metreaspecializes in signal classification, direction finding, advanced geolocation techniques, and waveform development including waveforms for MANET and LPI/LPD applications.

Metreaalso develops special purpose radios for government customers andlicensesDF and geolocation solutions to multiple OEMs. Within EM&C, RADLAB is our radar capability area. RADLAB is a small team building novel capabilities from the ground up, taking ideas from physics and math through simulation, prototype, and test.

RADLAB is looking for a Principal RF Engineer to own the RF front-end design for our advanced integrated sensing-and-communications (ISAC) design, test and evaluation (DT&E) platform. You will be responsible for the signal chain from the antenna element port inward through the analog-digital interface, complementing our principal antenna engineer who owns the radiating elements and array design. Together, you will define and maintain a clean interface between the antenna and RF front-end domains.

This is a hands-on individual-contributor role with significant technical leadership responsibility. You will translate system-level requirements into producible RF hardware, starting from trade studies through schematic capture, simulation, PCB layout, fabrication oversight, and bench validation. You will work directly with our prototype engineer to bring up and characterize hardware. The DT&E platform requires RF front-ends spanning C-band, Ka-band, and millimeter-wave frequencies, so the ability to work across frequency regimes is essential.

• Own the RF front-end architecture for the DT&E platform: signal chain topology, component selection, and interface definitions
• Design modular and testable receive and transmit signal chains: LNAs, PAs, TR switching, filtering, frequency conversion, and frequency synthesis, owning the cascade analysis, noise figure budget, linearity allocation, spurious plan, and power dissipation budget
• Develop frequency synthesis and LO distribution architectures that maintain phase coherence across multi-element systems, owning the trade-offs between integration, phase noise, spurious performance, and layout complexity
• Coordinate with the principal antenna engineer at the element-port boundary: translate scan impedance data into matching network designs, feed back PA load-pull requirements, and ensure front-end packaging is compatible with element spacing and thermal constraints
• Own the RF PCB design intent end-to-end: stack-up definition, material selection, impedance requirements, RF/EM co-simulation, and shielding strategy. Perform layout directly or drive external layout vendors with clear constraints and review their work for RF correctness. Generate manufacturing packages and resolve DFM issues through fabrication and assembly
• Work directly with other engineers to bring up, calibrate, and characterize RF front-end hardware. Diagnose and resolve issues from bench measurements through system-level integration
• Design and adapt RF…