Senior RF Data Scientist - Onsite Real-Time Drone Detection

Quell; Cambridge; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Quell, a high-growth British defence and security AI technology startup near Cambridge, seeksSenior RF Data Scientist / Research Engineer to work at the intersection of RF hardware, DSP and ML. You will analyse complex RF data from software-defined radios (SDRs), develop advanced signal-processing pipelines, and contribute to UAV/drone detection technologies.

This is a hands-on R&D role in a full-time Research & Prototyping team.

Qualifications

• Strong Python proficiency for data analysis and prototyping.
• Solid understanding of digital signal processing (FFT, filtering, modulation, correlation, noise modelling).
• Familiarity with SDR frameworks such as GNU Radio, SDRangel, osmoSDR, or SoapySDR.
• Practical understanding of RF hardware chains (antenna → filters → mixers → ADC) and their impact on baseband data.
• Experience analysing wireless protocols (Wi-Fi, LTE, LoRa) and physical-layer structures.
• Comfortable debugging SDR setups and carrying out field-based RF data collection.
• Strong communication skills in an iterative R&D environment.
• Hands-on experience with SDRs (bladeRF, HackRF, USRP, PlutoSDR) and RF lab equipment.

Responsibilities

• Analysing raw IQ data from SDR platforms to identify features.
• Building diagnostic tools for RF signal characterisation (time-frequency plots, cyclic spectra, EVM, autocorrelation, constellation tracking).
• Designing RF data-processing pipelines that account for real-world hardware constraints (bandwidth, gain stages, ADC limits, timing jitter).
• Modelling RF front-end behaviour to improve signal integrity and inference accuracy.
• Developing machine learning and statistical models for RF classification, anomaly detection, and emitter identification.
• Prototyping real-time and batch-processing systems in Python and integrating with backends such as GNU Radio or C++.
• Leading RF data collection, field experiments, and over-the-air testing with drones and wireless devices.

Skills

Python

DSP

ML basics

RF hardware concepts

Signal processing

MATLAB

C++

Tools

GNU Radio

SDRangel

osmoSDR

SoapySDR

BladeRF

USRP

PyTorch

NumPy

SciPy

Job description

Quell, a high-growth British defence and security AI technology startup near Cambridge, seeksSenior RF Data Scientist / Research Engineer to work at the intersection of RF hardware, DSP and ML. You will analyse complex RF data from software-defined radios (SDRs), develop advanced signal-processing pipelines, and contribute to UAV/drone detection technologies.

This is a hands-on R&D role in a full-time Research & Prototyping team.