Radio Frequency Engineer

Helsing; Oxford; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and VSOP options

Relocation support

Learning: yearly allowance

Health & wellbeing: gym + mentalhealth

Social: events and allowances

Enhanced parental leave

Family support

Infraduction onboarding

Job summary

Helsing is seeking an RF Engineer to join the Physical Products team in Oxford. You will design and integrate RF front‑ends, antennas and related hardware for our defence platforms, translating requirements into a robust RF architecture.

You will work across the full chain—from antenna design through to link budgets and EW resilience—hands‑on with real hardware, testing and validating in real environments rather than simulations.

Qualifications

• Have designed and integrated RF systems in a professional engineering context.
• Understand RF fundamentals deeply enough to reason from first principles, propagation, antenna theory, link budgets, modulation schemes, noise, and interference.
• Have hands-on experience with RF test and measurement equipment, and are comfortable debugging real hardware, not just simulation output.
• Have worked on systems that need to survive a contested or degraded RF environment, or can reason confidently about what that requires even without direct experience.
• Can interpret complex datasheets and specifications for RF components (amplifiers, filters, mixers, antennas) and translate them into sound design decisions.
• Collaborate effectively across disciplines, electronics, software, systems and communicate clearly in written and spoken English.

Responsibilities

• Design RF front-ends, antennas, and hardware trade-offs for platform missions.
• Own link budget analysis for communications and telemetry systems.
• Work on resilience to contested EM environments and interference.
• Integrate RF systems into wider electrical architecture and ensure EMI/grounding compatibility.
• Hands-on with RF test gear to characterize and validate real hardware.
• Collaborate with electronics, software, and systems engineers to ensure clean integration.
• Support field testing and feed results back into design.
• Produce clear documentation, budgets, test reports and interface definitions.

Skills

RF design experience

RF fundamentals

RF test equipment

RF resilience

RF components datasheets

English communication

Tools

HFSS

CST

GNU Radio

MATLAB RF toolbox

Job description

Who We Are

Helsing is a defence AI company. Our mission is to protect our democracies. We aim to achieve technological leadership, so that open societies can continue to make sovereign decisions and control their ethical standards.

Who We Are

Helsing is a defence AI company. Our mission is to protect our democracies. We aim to achieve technological leadership, so that open societies can continue to make sovereign decisions and control their ethical standards.

As democracies, we believe we have a special responsibility to be thoughtful about the development and deployment of powerful technologies like AI. We take this responsibility seriously.

We are an ambitious and committed team of engineers, AI specialists and customer‑facing programme managers. We are looking for mission‑driven people to join our European teams – and apply their skills to solve the most complex and impactful problems. We embrace an open and transparent culture that welcomes healthy debates on the use of technology in defence, its benefits, and its ethical implications.

The role

Every platform we build has to talk to something, a ground station, a network, a seeker, another aircraft and it has to keep talking when someone is actively trying to stop it. That link doesn't get to be an afterthought.

As an RF Engineer on the Physical Products team, you'll design and integrate the radio frequency systems that make our platforms work in the real, contested electromagnetic environments they're built for, not a clean lab bench. You'll work across the full chain, from antenna and front‑end design through to link budgets and EW resilience, and you'll be hands‑on: designing, building, testing, and fixing real RF hardware, not just modelling it. This is a role for someone who wants their design decisions tested against a real environment, not just a spec sheet.

The day‑to‑day

• Design and specify RF front‑ends, antennas, and associated hardware, reasoning through gain, bandwidth, efficiency, size, and cost trade‑offs for a given platform and mission
• Own link budget analysis for communications, telemetry, and/or seeker/radar systems, translating range, data rate, and reliability requirements into a defensible RF architecture
• Work on resilience to a contested electromagnetic environment, jamming, spoofing, and interference and design systems that degrade gracefully rather than fail outright
• Integrate RF systems into the wider electrical architecture, managing grounding, shielding, and EMC considerations so RF performance survives contact with the rest of the platform
• Get hands‑on with RF test equipment, spectrum analysers, VNAs, signal generators to characterise, debug, and validate real hardware, not just simulate it
• Work closely with electronics, software, and systems engineers to ensure RF subsystems integrate cleanly with power, structure, and the rest of the avionics stack
• Support field testing of RF and communications systems, including range trials and EW/interference testing, and feed real‑world results back into the design
• Produce clear documentation, link budgets, test reports, interface definitions, that the rest of the team and our customers can actually rely on

You should apply if you

• Have designed and integrated RF systems in a professional engineering context, ideally within aerospace, defence, or another demanding, safety‑critical domain
• Understand RF fundamentals deeply enough to reason from first principles, propagation, antenna theory, link budgets, modulation schemes, noise, and interference
• Have hands‑on experience with RF test and measurement equipment, and are comfortable debugging real hardware, not just simulation output
• Have worked on systems that need to survive a contested or degraded RF environment, or can reason confidently about what that requires even without direct experience
• Can interpret complex datasheets and specifications for RF components (amplifiers, filters, mixers, antennas) and translate them into sound design decisions
• Collaborate effectively across disciplines, electronics, software, systems and communicate clearly in written and spoken English

Note: We operate in an industry where women, as well as other minority groups, are systematically under‑represented. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all the listed qualifications; ability and impact cannot be summarised in a few bullet points.

Nice to Have

• Experience with electronic warfare (EW), signals intelligence, or counter‑UAS RF systems
• Experience with radar or seeker RF front‑end design
• Familiarity with SDR (software‑defined radio) platforms and associated toolchains (GNU Radio, MATLAB RF toolbox, or equivalent)
• Experience with antenna design and simulation tools (e.g. HFSS, CST)
• Exposure to relevant standards and spectrum regulations for defence or aerospace RF systems

Join Helsing and work with world‑leading experts in their fields

• Helsing’s work is important. You’ll be directly contributing to the protection of democratic countries while balancing both ethical and geopolitical concerns
• The work is unique. We operate in a domain that has highly unusual technical requirements and constraints, and where robustness, safety, and ethical considerations are vital. You will face unique Engineering and AI challenges that make a meaningful impact in the world
• Our work frequently takes us right up to the state of the art in technical innovation, be it reinforcement learning, distributed systems, generative AI, or deployment infrastructure. The defence industry is entering the most exciting phase of the technological development curve. Advances in our field of world are not incremental: Helsing is part of, and often leading, historic leaps forward
• In our domain, success is a matter of order‑of‑magnitud e improvements and novel capabilities. This means we take bets, aim high, and focus on big opportunities. Despite being a relatively young company, Helsing has already been selected for multiple significant government contracts
• We actively encourage healthy, proactive, and diverse debate internally about what we do and how we choose to do it. Teams and individual engineers are trusted (and encouraged) to practise responsible autonomy and critical thinking, and to focus on outcomes, not conformity. At Helsing you will have a say in how we (and you!) work, the opportunity to engage on what does and doesn’t work, and to take ownership of aspects of our culture that you care deeply about

What we offer

• Competitive salary and VSOP options
• Relocation support: up to €2,500 and 4 weeks temporary accommodation
• Learning: €500/£450 yearly allowance
• Health & wellness: gym membership and mental health support (Nilo.health)
• Social: regular company events and monthly social allowances
• Enhanced parental leave: 22 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers & 6 weeks for secondary caregivers
• Family support: 5 days of paid family emergency leave, 100% remote work option during pregnancy and phased return to work
• A hands‑on onboarding program (affectionately labelled “Infraduction”), in which you will be building tooling and applications to be used across the company. This is your opportunity to learn our tech stack, explore the company, and learn how we get things done - all whilst working with other engineering teams from day one

Helsing is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability or gender identity. Please do not submit personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, data concerning your health, or data concerning your sexual orientation.

Helsing's Candidate Privacy and Confidentiality Regime can be found here.