Senior RF Hardware Engineer

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Bristol, Bristol, UK, Hybrid

Key areas of responsibility

• Designing RF front-end architectures including amplification stages, filtering, frequency conversion, and signal conditioning.
• Designing and owning RF and mixed-signal hardware from concept and schematic capture through to PCB implementation and hardware bring-up.
• Developing mixed-signal hardware integrating high-speed ADCs, DACs and associated clocking architectures.
• Designing multi-layer RF PCBs, ensuring strong RF performance, signal integrity, grounding strategies, shielding and manufacturability.
• Selecting and integrating RF components including amplifiers, mixers, filters, oscillators, clocking systems and converters.
• Bringing up new RF hardware platforms and validating RF performance using appropriate laboratory measurement equipment.
• Debugging and optimising RF signal chains across analogue and mixed-signal domains.
• Supporting integration of RF hardware with FPGA-based SDR platforms and embedded processing systems.
• Working closely with signal processing and FPGA engineers to ensure RF hardware supports system-level performance requirements.
• Producing high-quality design documentation, schematics and design reviews.

Key skills, experience and behaviours

• Strong experience designing RF and analogue hardware for wireless or radio systems.
• Experience designing RF signal chains including amplification, filtering, mixing and gain control.
• Strong understanding of the full RF signal chain, from antenna interface and RF front-end through to ADC/DAC integration and digital processing pipelines.
• Experience integrating high-speed ADC and DAC devices into RF systems.
• Experience designing multi-layer mixed-signal PCBs including schematic capture and layout.
• Experience with PCB design tools such as KiCad, Altium Designer or similar, with a preference for candidates comfortable developing complete board designs.
• Strong understanding of RF PCB layout principles including impedance control, grounding strategies, isolation, return paths and signal integrity.
• Experience bringing up new RF hardware platforms and diagnosing real-world performance issues across analogue, mixed-signal and digital domains.
• Practical experience using RF laboratory equipment such as spectrum analysers, vector network analysers, signal generators and oscilloscopes.
• Ability to analyse RF system performance including noise figure, gain, dynamic range and bandwidth.
• Experience working collaboratively with RF, FPGA, embedded software and systems engineers.

• Experience developing hardware for Software Defined Radio systems.
• Familiarity with RF simulation tools and signal chain modelling.
• Experience integrating RF hardware with FPGA-based platforms such as Zynq or similar architectures.
• Understanding of digital signal processing concepts relevant to RF systems.
• Experience designing hardware for low-SWaP or edge-deployed systems.
• Experience developing hardware used in sensing, electronic warfare, or communications systems.

• Problem-solver: Able to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues pragmatically and efficiently.
• Systems thinker: Comfortable reasoning about interconnected RF, mixed-signal and digital systems.
• Detail-oriented: Maintains high standards and adherence to engineering best practices.
• Adaptable and self-motivated: Learns quickly and continuously develops technical capability.
• Collaborative: Works effectively across disciplines, sharing knowledge openly.
• Continuous improvement mindset: Proactively identifies opportunities to improve systems, processes, and ways of working.
• Agile mindset: Applies Agile principles pragmatically, facilitating alignment, prioritisation, and collaboration.

Working at Rowden