FPGA Engineer - Radar

About Alta Ares

Founded in 2024, we have grown to 90 people, raised over $60M, and increased revenue 40× this year. We are now entering a new phase of international expansion, industrial scaling, fundraising, and product development.

Role & Mission

• Turn radar sensing requirements into FPGA designs that support reliable drone detection in operational conditions.
• Define how radar data is acquired, processed, and delivered to the rest of the system, working across RF, electronics, and software teams.
• Establish processing budgets and select implementation approaches based on detection performance, latency, numerical accuracy, and available FPGA resources.
• Develop reference models to study radar behavior in noise and clutter and guide hardware design decisions.
• Build reusable RTL functions for waveform generation and receive processing in FMCW and pulsed radar systems.
• Implement the processing stages needed to extract targets from radar returns, including matched filtering, pulse compression, range-Doppler processing, clutter rejection, and CFAR detection.
• Integrate ADC/DAC interfaces, coordinate transmit and receive timing, and ensure synchronization with the radar front end.
• Specify how detections and associated measurements are passed to tracking functions and embedded software.
• Verify designs against reference models through automated testbenches and hardware-in-the-loop testing.
• Investigate performance gaps on target hardware and use laboratory measurements and field results to improve the processing chain.
• Document design decisions, interfaces, and validation results to support integration and future product development.

Candidate Profile

• At least three years of FPGA development experience, with practical exposure to radar or sonar processing.
• Ability to take a signal-processing function from an algorithmic description to verified RTL in VHDL or Verilog/SystemVerilog.
• Strong DSP foundations, including FFT, digital filtering, windowing, and the effects of quantization and fixed-point precision.
• Understanding of how radar systems estimate target range and velocity, distinguish returns from clutter, and set detection thresholds.
• Working knowledge of matched filtering, pulse compression, range-Doppler maps, and CFAR techniques.
• Familiarity with FMCW and pulsed radar, including the relationship between waveform choices, acquisition timing, and digital processing.
• Experience assessing radar performance through simulation, including signal-to-noise ratio and clutter effects.
• Experience developing testbenches, debugging FPGA hardware, and validating processing chains with hardware-in-the-loop methods.
• Master’s degree or equivalent in Electrical Engineering, Signal Processing, Applied Physics, or a related field.

Skills & Qualities

• Hands-on engineer motivated by making radar processing work reliably on physical hardware.
• Able to connect system-level performance issues with their causes in algorithms, RTL, interfaces, or timing.
• Methodical approach to debugging, verification, and documenting technical decisions.
• Comfortable owning development tasks and coordinating integration work across disciplines.
• Clear communicator who makes trade-offs explicit and flags risks early.
• Entrepreneurial mindset with the ability to operate autonomously in a fast-growing company.
• High integrity and professionalism in handling sensitive defense technologies.