UAV Communications Engineer

About the Role

We are developing autonomous fixed-wing UAVs that will operate together as a swarm, communicate with each other in real time, and maintain connectivity with a Ground Control Station (GCS) hundreds to thousands of kilometers away.

We are looking for an engineer with a strong understanding of wireless communication, RF systems, networking, and long-range telemetry who can help us design a reliable communication architecture for the entire UAV swarm.

This is a hands-on role involving communication-system design, hardware selection, integration, testing, network analysis, and real-world flight testing.

What you’ll do

Working closely with our Embedded, Avionics and flight test teams you will:

• Long-Range Communication: Develop reliable communication between the UAV swarm and a remote Ground Control Station over tens to hundreds of kilometers.
• Network Architecture: Determine how communication should be routed across the swarm, including relay aircraft, multi-hop communication, and recovery when individual links are lost.
• System Design: Select suitable radios, antennas, communication hardware, and network architecture based on range, bandwidth, latency, reliability, weight, and power constraints.
• System Integration: Integrate the communication system with the aircraft avionics, autopilot, swarm software, and Ground Control Station.

Skills and Competencies

We are particularly interested in experience with:

• Wireless Communication & RF: RF communication, SNR, RSSI, interference, fading, multipath, modulation, coding, and wireless propagation.
• Networking: Mesh networking, multi-hop routing, dynamic routing, relay networks, TCP/IP, UDP, redundancy, and network recovery.
• Long-Range Communication: Telemetry radios, sub-GHz systems and long-range RF systems.
• Antennas & Hardware: Omnidirectional and directional antennas, antenna gain, polarization, diversity, amplifiers, filters, RF integration, and antenna placement.
• Embedded & UAV Systems: Embedded Linux, C/C++, Python, MAVLink, ArduPilot/PX4, serial communication, network interfaces, RF modems, and telemetry systems.

Nice to haves

• Strong practical or research experience in wireless communication, RF systems, networking, telemetry, embedded communication systems, autonomous vehicles, UAVs, or similar fields.
• Direct experience with UAV communication, swarm networking, MANET/mesh networks, long-range telemetry, tactical communication systems, or autonomous robotics is highly desirable.