Senior RF Systems Engineer — Ground Stations & Cloud CI/CD

Viasat; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Viasat is seeking a Senior RF Systems Engineer to deliver hands-on design, integration, and testing across the satellite ground station lifecycle from London. This role is a technical IC position with no people management responsibilities and involves developing RF systems, testing campaigns, and cloud-based signal processing workloads.

You will contribute to DiFi/VITA 49 and RFoIP initiatives, maintain CI/CD pipelines and IaC modules, and support on-call rotations with Operations and NOC.

Qualifications

• 8-12 years ground station system design, integration, and test experience.
• Degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering or Telecommunications.
• Proven 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 RF system design and analysis: link budgets, G/T, EIRP, and antenna characterization across multiple bands.
• Plan, execute, and document FAT, SAT, and IOT test campaigns for new/upgraded earth station 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 to P&CSE quality standards.
• Travel to earth station sites and supplier facilities as required.

Skills

RF system design

Link budget analysis

CI/CD pipelines

DevOps / IaC

AWS / GCP

AI in engineering

Education

Electrical/Electronic Engineering or Telecommunications degree

Tools

Ansible

Terraform

AWS

GCP

Job description

Viasat is seeking a Senior RF Systems Engineer to deliver hands-on design, integration, and testing across the satellite ground station lifecycle from London. This role is a technical IC position with no people management responsibilities and involves developing RF systems, testing campaigns, and cloud-based signal processing workloads.

You will contribute to DiFi/VITA 49 and RFoIP initiatives, maintain CI/CD pipelines and IaC modules, and support on-call rotations with Operations and NOC.