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.

Group Overview

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.  Metrea specializes in signal classification, direction finding, advanced geolocation techniques, and waveform development including waveforms for MANET and LPI/LPD applications. Metrea also develops special purpose radios for government customers and licenses DF and geolocation solutions to multiple OEMs. Within EM&C, RADLAB is our radar capability area. RADLAB is a small team building novel capabilities from the ground up, taking ideas from physics and math through simulation, prototype, and test.

Capability Area

The Electromagnetic and Cyber Group (EM&C) inside Metrea develops and builds systems for communications, RF sensing, and electromagnetic effects. Within EM&C, the Radar Lab (RADLAB) turns advanced integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) concepts into working systems. Staffed and organized around a Bell Labs model, RADLAB’s work starts from fundamental first-principles physics and applied mathematics: deriving signal models, algorithms, and performance predictions, then carrying them through simulation, prototype, hardware test, and mission application. Our research is driven by real operational problems. The work has to result in hardware that gets built and measured, but there is time and space to do the science and engineering right, and because the team is small and hands-on, our scientists and engineers stay close to the ideas they develop and the systems they build. Good ideas are welcome from anywhere on the team, but they have to connect back to capability someone needs.

Position Summary

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 and 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.

What You'll Do

• 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 intent end-to-end: stack-up definition, material  selection , impedance requirements,  RF/ EM co-simulation, and shielding strategy.  Perform layout directly or d rive external layout vendors with clear constraints and review their work for RF correctness. Generate manufacturing packages and resolve DFM issues through fabrication and assembly.

• Work directly with other engineers to bring up, calibrate, and characterize RF front-end hardware. Diagnose and resolve issues from bench measurements through system-level integration.

• Design and adapt RF  front-ends  across C-band, Ka-band, and potentially millimeter-wave, addressing the packaging, thermal, and loss challenges specific to each regime.

• Specify and integrate RF components with digital subsystems. Collaborate with FPGA and DSP engineers on the analog-digital interface: clocking, data formats, signal conditioning, and the analog/digital boundary.

• Define RF test and calibration procedures for front-end and system-level performance verification.

• Lead design reviews,  establish  RF design standards and documentation practices within RADLAB, and mentor junior engineers.

• Contribute to proposals and technical white papers with  RF  feasibility assessments and architecture concepts.

What You Bring

• BS, MS or PhD in Electrical Engineering, RF/Microwave Engineering, or a closely related field.

• 10+ years of professional experience designing performance-critical RF hardware in a radar, EW, communications, or similar system context. Equivalent depth through other kinds of applied RF engineering will also be considered, including RF hardware design in academic research, national labs, or FFRDCs.

• Comfort working within system-level constraints set by the broader team: there is significant design freedom within the domain, but requirements come from the mission.

• Demonstrated experience owning RF subsystems end-to-end: from architecture and trade studies through schematic capture, simulation, PCB layout, fabrication, bring-up, and test.

• Proficiency in RF cascade analysis, link budget development, noise figure budgeting, and transceiver system design.

• Strong hands-on experience with RF circuit simulation (ADS, MWO, MATLAB, or equivalent) tools.

• Proficiency in RF/microwave PCB design: impedance-controlled routing, high-frequency material selection and characterization, multi-layer stack-up design, and EM co-simulation.

• Experience with schematic capture and layout tools (Altium, OrCAD, DxDesigner, or equivalent).