Director of RF Hardware Engineering

The Role

We're hiring a Director of RF Engineering to lead the team building the RF hardware at the center of our space radios.

Reporting to the VP of RF and Digital, you will own execution across the RF engineering organization — delivery, quality, technical direction, and the people.

The defining requirement is technical credibility. Our RF team includes experienced engineers with flight hardware behind them, and they will follow a leader whose technical judgment they respect. You do not need to be the best RF designer in the building but you do need to understand trade-offs, build consensus and build scalable processes.

This is not a program management role and not a pure people-management role. Expect to be in schematic reviews, architecture debates, and failure investigations, forming your own view.

What You'll Do

• Lead the RF engineering team — hardware engineers, senior ICs, and the leads beneath you — across concurrent radio programs.
• Own delivery: scope, schedule, resourcing, and prioritization, with a clear-eyed read of what the team can actually commit to and the willingness to say so early.
• Be the technical decision-maker for RF hardware below the VP: arbitrate architecture and implementation trades, settle disputes, and hold the design bar in review.
• Own the health of the design review, verification, and documentation process — enough rigor for hardware that has to work on orbit, without turning the team into a paperwork shop.
• Partner across the stack with FPGA and DSP, embedded software, mechanical and thermal, manufacturing, test, and supply chain so RF decisions land well outside RF.
• Own hiring, leveling, performance, and career development for the team; build the bench and keep your best people.
• Represent RF engineering technically with customers, primes, and partners, including in government program contexts.
• Drive the transition from heroics to repeatability as we scale — NPI discipline, test infrastructure, and design reuse across products.

Required Skills

• 10+ years in RF or hardware engineering, including 4+ years leading engineering teams
• Direct experience managing senior individual contributors and other leads or managers, and a track record of retaining them.
• Deep personal RF background: you have designed RF hardware yourself and can hold your own in a detailed design review on noise figure, linearity, frequency planning, and layout.
• Demonstrated leadership in demanding hardware environments — space, defense, or comparably high-consequence programs with real delivery pressure and real consequences for being wrong.
• Breadth across hardware beyond RF: digital and high-speed design, power, FPGA interfaces, mechanical and thermal constraints, and manufacturability.
• A record of hiring senior engineers successfully and of raising a team's technical standard, not just its headcount.
• Judgment about when to decide, when to delegate, and when to escalate — without becoming the bottleneck.

Desired Skills

• Flight hardware programs delivered under your leadership, from design through on-orbit operation.
• Experience scaling an engineering team through a period of rapid growth.
• Familiarity with software-defined radio architectures and modern converter-centric designs.
• Experience interfacing with government customers and prime contractors on technical matters.
• Background introducing process into a fast-moving team in a way the team adopted rather than resented.

Compensation

The estimated base salary range for this role is $225,000 – $275,000 per year, plus equity. This range reflects our good-faith estimate for this position at the time of posting. The final base salary offered will depend on a variety of factors, including the candidate's qualifications, relevant experience, skills, and market considerations. In addition to base salary, total compensation includes an equity grant and our full benefits package (Medical, Dental, Vision), HSA's and 401K program.

Additional Information

In order to comply with the space technology export rules of the U.S. Government, such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), it is necessary to be a U.S. citizen, a lawful U.S. permanent resident, a protected individual as specified by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or possess eligibility to secure the necessary authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. For additional information on ITAR, please seek further details.

Should you have a need for accommodation, AnySignal will endeavor to meet your accommodation needs. At any stage of the recruitment and selection process you may make your needs for accommodation known through contacting our team, in confidence, by email to: careers@anysignal.com