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.

Our operating model is built around three interlocking pillars. The Support Groups provide a global shared-service – spanning people, finance, platform, operations, legal, and engagement. This frees up our Core Groups, who develop and own mission capabilities end-to-end, to focus entirely on delivery. The Market Groups apply a regional lens, ensuring that our agile and adaptable capabilities remain aligned to the wicked problems that matter most to our partners across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific.

At the heart of our model is a simple but powerful idea: be a true partner with skin in the game. Our partners need effects, not just equipment. By owning the full stack – from the lab to the field – we are able to drive a continuous cycle of innovation that keeps our partners ahead. It’s a fast-moving, intellectually demanding environment where talented people are given real responsibility, work on problems that matter, and contribute to an enterprise that is growing quickly and deliberately.

Headquartered in Washington, DC, with facilities across the United States, the United Kingdom, as well as Continental Europe and Asia-Pacific.

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.

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…