RF Engineer — Defence Tech, Hands-On, Remote Options

helsing.ai; Greater London; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation support

Learning allowance

Health & wellness benefits

Social events

Enhanced parental leave

Remote work option during pregnancy

Job summary

Helsing, a defence AI company, is seeking an RF Engineer for its European team. You will design and integrate RF front-ends, antennas and associated hardware, delivering robust links in contested environments.

Hands-on hardware work, testing and cross-disciplinary collaboration are core to the role. You will work across the full RF chain—from antenna to link budgets—while ensuring EMC, grounding, and system integration align with platform requirements.

Qualifications

• 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

Responsibilities

• 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 characterize, 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

Skills

RF design

Antenna design

Link budgets

RF testing

EMC considerations

English communication

Tools

Spectrum analysers

VNAs

Signal generators

Job description

Helsing, a defence AI company, is seeking an RF Engineer for its European team. You will design and integrate RF front-ends, antennas and associated hardware, delivering robust links in contested environments.

Hands-on hardware work, testing and cross-disciplinary collaboration are core to the role. You will work across the full RF chain—from antenna to link budgets—while ensuring EMC, grounding, and system integration align with platform requirements.