Founding Engineer — Autonomous Spectrum Intelligence

Location: San Juan, Puerto Rico

Department: Engineering

WHO WE ARE

Small team. High trust. No bureaucracy. ITERRAis building the Arsenal of the Caribbean, a sovereign-capable, dual-use autonomous detection and classification platform for defense and critical infrastructure. No tourists. Only builders.

WHAT YOU OWN

You are a technical founder-level hire. You will own the full sensing and classification stack, antenna to edge inference and the anomaly detection engine that identifies threats the system has never seen before. This is not a staff role. You define how ITERRA sees the electromagnetic spectrum, and you build the autonomous detection pipeline that gets smarter with every deployment. 

• Design and build protocol-agnostic detection that identifies UAS-like RF behavior from spectral characteristics, energy detection, bandwidth analysis, duty cycle patterns, frequency hopping behavior, and Doppler signatures — without matching against known signatures. Wideband coverage across operationally relevant UAS frequency bands.
• Classification enrichment layer: Build and maintain a pipeline that enriches anomaly detections with protocol-specific identification when signals match known architectures. Continuous retraining fed by field data.
• RF signature dataset and data flywheel: Own the operationally validated threat dataset that grows with every deployment. Collection protocols, ground-truth labeling, versioning, augmentation, and model update pipeline for continuous retraining. Every deployed node makes the system smarter.
• Full sensing-to-alert pipeline: Spectrum capture through edge inference to operator alert. Non-cooperative Group 1 UAS detection across control links, video downlinks, motor/ESC emissions, and RF fingerprints.
• Hardware under SWaP-C: SDR front ends (Ettus USRP, Epiq Solutions, or equivalent), FPGA/SoC (Xilinx/AMD RFSoC), NVIDIA edge embedded compute, outdoor device thermal management. You own the hardware-software boundary.
• MOSA/SOSA C2 integration: Sensor fusion with allied command and control systems and tactical data protocols. Interface Control Document (ICD) development that defines inputs, outputs, and data formats.

WHAT WE REQUIRE

7+ years of RF engineering, signal processing, or Electronic Support Measures (ESM)/Signals Intelligence (SIGINT). B.S. in Electrical Engineering or Physics required; M.S./Ph.D. preferred. You have personally taken an RF sensing system from concept to live operational deployment — not a lab demo.

• Anomaly detection and unsupervised/semi-supervised learning: Experience building detection models that generalize to unknown emitters. Spectral anomaly identification, behavioral heuristics, and novelty detection on RF data. You can detect threats the system has never been trained on.
• Signal processing: FFT/STFT, CFAR, cyclostationary analysis, modulation recognition, RF fingerprinting, TDOA geolocation, wideband energy detection 200 MHz – 6 GHz (18 GHz preferred).
• RF system design: Receiver sensitivity, NF/IP3, dynamic range, link budgets, antenna selection (DF arrays, CP), ESM threat library design, TDOA/FDOA/AOA geolocation.
• SDR platforms: GNU Radio (custom OOT modules), UHD, SoapySDR. Experience with Ettus USRP, Epiq Solutions, or equivalent wideband SDR hardware required.
  Hardware: FPGA/RFSoC implementation (RTL/HLS), NVIDIA edge embedded compute. Python, C/C++, MATLAB, VHDL/Verilog.
• Edge ML: Raw RF feature extraction, quantized inference (TensorRT, TFLite) on constrained hardware. Experience with both supervised classifiers and unsupervised anomaly detectors on embedded platforms.
• Interoperability and data standards: Experience defining open interface specifications, data schemas, or ICDs for multi-vendor/multi-agency integration. Familiarity with tactical C2 data protocols and plugin development.
• Operator fluency: Translate tactical requirements into engineering tradeoffs across power, thermal, bandwidth, and latency.
• Preferred: SIGINT/ESM background — NSA, DIA, service intel, or ESM product lines. Experience with non-cooperative emitter characterization in contested RF environments.
• Active TS/SCI or TS clearance.

WHAT WE OFFER

• Highly competitive base salary + founding equity.
• Act 60 Puerto Rico: Income tax on first $100K only, above that is exempt. 0% capital gains on equity for bona fide PR residents.
• Health, dental, vision + flexible PTO.
• A founding role where you own the technical vision. Not a staff augmentation seat. Not someone else's roadmap.

If this sounds like your kind of challenge, we'd love to hear from you!

This position requires access to export-controlled information under ITAR (22 CFR §120–130). Applicants must be U.S. citizens as defined by 8 U.S.C. §1324b(a)(3). iTERRA Solutions is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.