Senior Engineering Manager, RF Hardware Verified today

The Role

CesiumAstro is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager, RF Hardware to lead a growing team developing high-performance electronics for communications systems, including phased arrays, beamforming networks, RF front-ends, and software-defined radios. You will be accountable for the technical quality and on-time delivery of your team's hardware, from architecture and design through production.

This is a deeply technical management role, not an individual-contributor design position. You will provide technical guidance, lead design and architecture reviews, mentor engineers, and direct critical debug efforts, while building a team that consistently produces excellent work. You will also establish the standards, tools, processes, and reusable engineering approaches that allow CesiumAstro's hardware teams to execute rigorously and efficiently across sites.

What Success Looks Like

• Your team delivers high-quality, manufacturable hardware to product lines predictably and on schedule, with designs that transition successfully into repeatable production at required scale.
• Engineering quality improves as the organization grows. You identify technical weaknesses, mentor engineers through them, and turn lessons learned into better standards, tools, reviews, and processes.
• Teams benefit from shared engineering practices and technical knowledge across CesiumAstro. Engineers reuse proven components, designs, and approaches, with common processes and standards enabling rigorous engineering without unnecessary bureaucracy.
• You build a stronger engineering organization. Engineers grow in technical judgment and responsibility, strong technical and people leaders emerge, and the organization develops the capability and leadership structure needed to scale.
• You manage an initial team of approximately 8-12 direct reports, primarily in Austin and Westminster, with a smaller presence in El Segundo. As CesiumAstro grows, people management becomes increasingly site-focused while this role continues to provide technical and process leadership across the company.

Responsibilities

• Maintain technical integrity and engineering excellence for board-level RF electronics development across the company.
• Establish, mature, and scale engineer-friendly RF hardware development processes, including signal chain design and analysis, simulation, and schematic and layout standards for dense, high-layer-count PCBs.
• Provide detailed technical review and mentorship through architecture and design reviews, identifying design risks early and ensuring appropriate subject matter expert engagement across digital, RF, power, firmware, and mechanical disciplines.
• Occasionally contribute directly to RF designs, particularly to close temporary gaps in high-risk or schedule-critical programs.
• Lead or support complex debug efforts involving RF electronics and related technical topics.
• Ensure RF hardware designs are buildable and testable at scale using design for manufacturability (DFM) and design for test (DFT) best practices.
• Drive disciplined handoff from engineering to manufacturing through close collaboration with manufacturing engineering, supply chain, and production test engineering.
• Ensure designs meet quality, reliability, and scalability requirements for aerospace and defense production environments.
• Partner with Supply Chain to ensure component availability, lifecycle risk mitigation, and cost awareness.
• Drive design reuse, modular architectures, and platform commonality across products to accelerate execution and reduce risk.
• Build, scale, and lead a high-performing RF hardware engineering team that delivers reliably to multidisciplinary product teams.
• Lead, coach, and develop an initial team of approximately 8-12 engineers distributed primarily across Austin and Westminster, with a smaller presence in El Segundo.
• Partner with product and program leadership to plan work, allocate resources, surface technical risk early, and hold the team accountable to realistic delivery commitments.
• Own staffing and team development, including hiring, performance management, career development, coaching, and succession planning.
• Provide one-on-one coaching, mentoring, and deep technical guidance.
• Plan and manage budgets related to staffing, lab equipment, capital equipment, and design/simulation software.
• Maintain strong working relationships across Engineering, Quality, and Operations.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Electrical Engineering.
• Minimum of 9 years of direct board-level RF hardware engineering experience, preferably in aerospace environments.
• 2-5 years of small-team technical leadership or engineering management experience preferred but not required.
• Demonstrated deep expertise in RF board design, including strong working knowledge of the digital and power electronics required to make an RF board function.
• Experience supporting design for manufacturability (DFM), design for test (DFT), and transition from development to production.
• Proven ability to conduct rigorous technical reviews, mentor engineers, and communicate effectively across disciplines.
• Ability to balance rigor with execution speed in a fast-paced development environment.
• Proficiency with RF simulation and analysis tools such as Pathwave System Design (SystemVue), RF Synthesis (Genesys), and HFSS.
• Deep hands-on experience with schematic capture and PCB layout tools such as Altium.
• Strong technical and non-technical communication skills.

Compensation and Benefits

CesiumAstro considers several factors when extending an offer, including role, responsibilities, work experience, education/training, and key skills. Full-time employment offers include company stock options and a generous benefits package including health, dental, vision, HSA, FSA, life, disability and retirement plans.

Employment Requirements

To conform with United States Government Space Technology Export Regulations, the applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., conditional resident, asylee or refugee (as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3)), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.