Senior RF Systems Engineer: Cloud-Driven Ground Stations

Viasat; United Kingdom; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Viasat in London seeks an experienced Senior RF Systems Engineer to design, integrate, and test earth station RF systems across multiple bands, with a strong emphasis on link budgets and system performance.

You will contribute to DiFi and RFoIP programs, deploy cloud-based signal processing workloads on AWS/GCP, and maintain CI/CD pipelines and IaC modules. This is a hands-on, individual contributor role requiring on-call availability.

Qualifications

• 8-12 years ground station system design, integration, and test experience.
• Degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering or Telecommunications.
• Hands-on RF expertise across multiple frequency bands with strong link budget and test skills.
• Working knowledge of DiFi/VITA 49, RFoIP, DevOps CI/CD, AWS/GCP, and AI engineering tools.
• Seeking a technical individual contributor role with no people management responsibility.

Responsibilities

• Perform detailed RF system design and analysis: link budgets, G/T, EIRP, linearity, antenna characterization across L/S/C/Ku/Ka/Q/V bands.
• Plan, execute, and document FAT, SAT, and IOT test campaigns for RF systems.
• Contribute to DiFi digitiser chain design, validation, and interoperability testing.
• Contribute to RFoIP encapsulation, QoS, PTP synchronisation, and SDR modem integration.
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipeline stages, IaC modules (Ansible/Terraform), and automated RF test scripts.
• Deploy and support containerised RF signal processing workloads on AWS EKS or GCP GKE.
• Contribute to cloud RF data pipelines using AWS Kinesis / GCP Pub/Sub and post-pass analysis via Athena / BigQuery.
• Apply AI/ML tools to engineering workflows: LLMs for documentation, anomaly detection on RF telemetry, AI-assisted simulation.
• Provide third-line RF support to Operations and NOC, including on-call rota participation.
• Produce and maintain engineering documentation (ICDs, test plans, acceptance reports) to P&CSE quality standards.
• Travel to earth station sites and supplier facilities as required by programme activities.

Skills

RF systems engineering

Cloud platforms AWS/GCP

CI/CD DevOps

On-call support

Test & integration

Education

Bachelor's degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering or Telecommunications

Tools

DiFi/VITA 49

RFoIP

AWS

GCP

Ansible/Terraform

Job description

Viasat in London seeks an experienced Senior RF Systems Engineer to design, integrate, and test earth station RF systems across multiple bands, with a strong emphasis on link budgets and system performance.

You will contribute to DiFi and RFoIP programs, deploy cloud-based signal processing workloads on AWS/GCP, and maintain CI/CD pipelines and IaC modules. This is a hands-on, individual contributor role requiring on-call availability.