Senior Antenna Engineer

The role

The Senior Antenna Engineer will own the radiating hardware for wireless platforms including sensors, access points, and mothernodes. This hands-on role involves antenna architecture, electromagnetic simulation, prototyping, measurement, and production driving.

What you will do

• Lead antenna architecture, design, simulation, prototyping, integration, and validation for ground-based and airborne products.
• Develop antennas for technologies such as sub-GHz mesh, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, command-and-control, LTE, CBRS, and GNSS.
• Drive full-wave electromagnetic simulation in HFSS, CST, or FEKO.
• Design antennas into constrained enclosures shared with other components.
• Develop multi-radio isolation and coexistence strategy.
• Build out antenna measurement capability including return loss, impedance, isolation, efficiency, gain, radiation patterns, polarization, and total radiated performance.
• Close the loop from simulation to chamber to field using link telemetry.
• Drive antennas into production through supplier specification, tolerance analysis, and inspection criteria.
• Root-cause RF performance issues spanning antenna, radio, mechanical, and environmental domains.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's or higher in electrical engineering, applied physics, or electromagnetics.
• 5+ years designing antennas for production hardware.
• Experience taking at least one antenna from concept through measurement, certification and volume manufacture.
• Knowledge of radiation mechanisms, impedance and matching, efficiency versus directivity, polarization, coupling, ground-plane and counterpoise effects, and the size–bandwidth–efficiency trade for ele
• 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.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to operate with significant autonomy, prioritize effectively, and drive technically complex programs to completion.

Nice to have

• 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.

About the company

Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world. They build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that detect and reason about physical activity.