Senior Antenna Engineer

Specter • San Francisco, CA

4d

About The Position

Specter is hiring a Senior Antenna Engineer to own the radiating hardware at the edge of our wireless platform; every antenna on every sensor, access point and mothernode we ship. The 1 km wireless range our customers depend on is bought at the antenna, and so is the reliability of the video link that rides on it. This is a hands-on role with end-to-end ownership: architecture, electromagnetic simulation, prototyping, chamber measurement, certification support, and the correlation between what the model predicted and what a deployed fleet actually does in the field.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or higher in electrical engineering, applied physics, or electromagnetics.
• 5+ years designing antennas for production hardware : you've taken at least one antenna from concept through measurement, certification and volume manufacture.
• Genuine electromagnetics: radiation mechanisms, impedance and matching, efficiency versus directivity, polarization, coupling, ground-plane and counterpoise effects, and the size–bandwidth–efficiency trade for electrically small antennas.
• Fluency in a full-wave EM simulation tool such as HFSS, CST, FEKO or an equivalent platform.
• Hands-on measurement experience using VNA, spectrum analyzer, signal generator, and chamber work.
• Experience designing into mechanically constrained products such handsets, wearables, IoT devices, vehicles, drones, robots, or mobile devices.
• Comfort with multi-radio platforms and the isolation, coexistence and desense problems that come with them.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to multidisciplinary stakeholders.
• Ability to operate with significant autonomy, prioritize effectively, and drive technically complex programs to completion.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree or PhD in electrical engineering, electromagnetics, applied physics, or a related field.
• Sub-GHz or ISM band experience (902–928 MHz, 868 MHz), or other work where the antenna is a large fraction of a wavelength.
• FCC Part 15 certification experience, particularly the intentional-radiator rules and the antenna-gain / conducted-power relationship.
• Experience specifying, commissioning or operating an anechoic chamber or antenna range.
• Outdoor and industrial hardware: radomes, environmental sealing, pole and mast mounting, temperature and ingress qualification.
• Scripting for measurement automation and data analysis such as Python or MATLAB.
• Field measurement experience: site surveys, installed-performance characterization, propagation measurement.
• Working directly with antenna suppliers, contract manufacturers and certification labs.

Responsibilities

• Lead antenna architecture, design, simulation, prototyping, integration, and validation for ground-based and airborne products.
• Develop antennas for sensors, access points, and mothernodes across technologies such as sub-GHz mesh (902–928 MHz), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, command-and-control, LTE, CBRS, and GNSS
• Drive full-wave electromagnetic simulation in HFSS, CST, or FEKO: modeling enclosure, radome, chassis, and nearby structures, and correlating predicted performance against measured hardware
• Design antennas into severely constrained enclosures shared with cameras, compute modules, batteries, cabling, and four other radios
• Develop multi-radio isolation and coexistence strategy
• Build out antenna measurement capability end-to-end: return loss, impedance, isolation, efficiency, gain, radiation patterns, polarization, and total radiated performance across bench, chamber, and installed configurations
• Close the loop from simulation to chamber to field, using link telemetry from hundreds of deployed nodes to make predicted performance match installed performance
• Drive antennas into production: supplier specification, tolerance and variation analysis, incoming inspection criteria, and the measurements that catch a bad build before it ships
• Root-cause RF performance issues spanning antenna, radio, mechanical, and environmental domains, using simulation, bench measurement, chamber data, and field telemetry

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior