Senior RF Systems Engineer - Satellite Ground Stations

About the role

Viasat is hiring a Senior RF Systems Engineer within its P&CSE team. This is a purely technical individual contributor role with no people management responsibilities and no direct reports. The engineer designs, integrates and tests earth station RF systems, works on DiFi (VITA 49) and RFoIP programmes, deploys cloud-based signal processing workloads, maintains DevOps pipelines and IaC modules, and applies AI tools to engineering workflows. The role includes participation in the P&CSE on-call rota.

Key responsibilities

• Design and analyse RF systems: link budgets, G/T, EIRP, linearity and antenna characterisation across L/S/C/Ku/Ka/Q/V bands
• Plan, run and document FAT, SAT and IOT test campaigns for new and upgraded earth stations
• Contribute to DiFi (VITA 49) digitiser chain design, validation and interoperability testing
• Work on RFoIP encapsulation, QoS, PTP synchronisation and SDR modem integration
• Maintain CI/CD pipelines, Ansible/Terraform IaC modules and automated RF test scripts
• Deploy and support containerised RF signal processing workloads on AWS EKS or GCP GKE
• Build cloud RF data pipelines with AWS Kinesis / GCP Pub/Sub and use Athena / BigQuery for post-pass analysis
• Use AI/ML tools such as LLMs for documentation and anomaly detection on RF telemetry
• Provide third-line RF support to Operations and NOC, including on-call duty
• Produce engineering documentation (ICDs, test plans, acceptance reports) to P&CSE quality standards and travel to earth station sites and suppliers

Required profile

• 8-12 years of ground station system design, integration and test experience
• Degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering or Telecommunications
• Hands-on RF expertise across multiple bands with strong link budget and test skills
• Willingness to join the P&CSE on-call rota and to travel internationally
• Based in or able to commute to London

Required skills

• Working knowledge of DiFi/VITA 49, RFoIP and DevOps CI/CD
• AWS and GCP
• Ansible and Terraform
• AI engineering tools