Wireless Software Engineer

Company Background

Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world.

Today, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment.

Our co-founders Xerxes and Philip are passionate about empowering our partners in the fast approaching world of physical AI and robotics. We are a small, fast growing team who hail from Anduril, Amazon, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.

Specter is hiring a Wireless Software Engineer to own the wireless software stack across our distributed mesh sensor network, spanning radio configuration and control on the device, fleet-wide telemetry and diagnostics, and the tooling our RF team uses to design, deploy, and debug real sites.

• Design, implement, and maintain the wireless software running on Specter's deployed edge devices, including radio configuration and control, channel and power management, QoS policy, rate control, and the device-side interfaces for remote node interrogation.

• Own fleetwide telemetry and diagnostics: collect, transport, store, and analyze per-link statistics across hundreds of deployed nodes, enabling remote diagnosis of link degradation.

• Integrate and characterize vendor wireless chipsets, drivers, and firmware including driver-level failure modes and engineering around vendor limitations we do not control.

• Debug complex issues spanning radio, driver, kernel, and application layers; determine root causes and instrument systems for future diagnostics.

• Collaborate closely with RF, Hardware Engineering, Embedded Software, and Backend teams to co-design interfaces, support new radio platforms, and ensure strong connections between wireless performance and end-to-end video quality and latency.

• Build and maintain automation and tooling for fleet operations, including monitoring, alerting, configuration management, and targeted recovery processes.

• Develop RF simulation and deployment planning tools for real site design, including propagation modeling, channel assignment, and capacity estimation.

• Support field deployments through bring-up, site characterization, and post-deployment debugging, feeding insights from real-world behavior back into the design process.

• Contribute to the wireless foundations underpinning Specter’s next generation of autonomous and robotic platforms, such as drone communications and distributed node coordination.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with fluency in Python and at least one systems language such as C, C++, Go, or Rust.

• Extensive Linux experience, including systemd services, working within the networking stack, and operating headless remote machines over SSH.

• Deep understanding of WLAN standards, including Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) MAC protocols, WFA protocols, and coexistence with other wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, UWB and cellular.

• Familiarity with the Linux wireless userspace: cfg
  80211/nl80211, hostapd, , and the related drivers.

• Experience with telemetry or data pipelines: collecting, storing, and querying operational data.

• Solid grasp of networking fundamentals across the whole stack from drivers up through application layer.

• Solid understanding of embedded system design principles, including memory estimation, resource allocation, power management, and performance optimization.

• Experience building and…