Radar Engineer

Job description

**Location:** Onsite — Austin, TX **Employment Type:** Direct Hire, Full-Time **Job Title:** Radar Engineer **About 9 Mothers** The modern battlefield has changed. Cheap, autonomous suicide drones have turned the tactical advantage upside down, and the world is looking for a solution. At 9 Mothers, we aren’t just "innovating"—we are building the shield. Backed by top-tier investors, we develop AI powered machines designed to intercept and neutralize Group 1/sUAS threats in real-time. Our flagship product is a low-power, counter-drone system built for the edge—on vehicles, at bases, or in a soldier's pack. **Why 9 Mothers?** While others build for "awareness" or "long-term research," we build for the immediate survival of those in harm’s way. We are a team of hackers, engineers, and mission-driven builders who value field-ready capability over polished slide decks. If you want to see your code or hardware in the field next month—not next year—this is your playground. **Position Summary** 9 Mothers is hiring a Radar Engineer to own the radar sensing layer of our counter-sUAS kill chain. In this role, you will integrate and tune radars from multiple vendors so that their detections and tracks feed cleanly into our platform—alongside our passive acoustic (Vor) and in-house visual detection stack—giving Edda and future systems an earlier, more reliable picture of incoming threats. You will own the full radar lifecycle: characterizing sensors, writing the software that ingests and processes radar data, tuning radar configurations for performance against small, fast, low-RCS targets in cluttered environments, and validating that performance on the range. This role sits at the intersection of RF engineering, embedded and real-time software, and systems integration in a fast-moving defense startup environment. **Essential Duties** **Radar Characterization:** Run bench and range characterization of the radars we field (e.g., FMCW, pulse-Doppler, electronically scanned arrays) to verify vendor performance claims and establish baselines for tuning. **Radar Integration:** Integrate multiple radar models into our counter-drone platform, including mechanical/electrical interfaces, timing and synchronization, coordinate-frame alignment, and vendor SDKs, APIs, and data protocols. **Software Development:** Design, build, and maintain the software that configures radars and ingests, filters, and publishes their detections and tracks to the rest of our system in a reliable, low-latency manner. **Performance Tuning:** Tune radar parameters—waveform and mode selection, detection thresholds, CFAR, clutter maps, Doppler filtering, and track initiation/maintenance—to maximize probability of detection and minimize false alarms against small, fast sUAS in real-world environments. **Sensor Fusion Support:** Work with the perception and controls teams to fuse radar tracks with acoustic and EO/IR data, and to cue our visual tracking and effectors from radar. **Testing & Validation:** Build and execute test plans, including simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and live-flight range testing with our UAS pilots, and establish metrics for detection range, track quality, latency, and false-alarm rate. **Field & Customer Support:** Support radar setup, site surveys, and tuning during customer demonstrations, pilots, and field deployments, troubleshooting issues from the RF front end through the software stack. **Documentation:** Produce and maintain integration documentation, interface control documents (ICDs), tuning guides, and test reports for internal teams and external partners. **Requirements** **Radar Experience:** 5+ years of hands-on experience as a radar engineer, radar systems engineer, or similar role, including work with more than one radar type or vendor. **Integration Track Record:** Demonstrated experience integrating radars into larger systems (vehicles, fixed sites, C-UAS, air defense, autonomy, or similar) and taking that integration through to fielded use. **Tuning & Optimization:** Proven experience tuning radar configuration and processing parameters to improve detection, tracking, and false-alarm performance in real-world clutter and interference. **Radar Fundamentals:** Strong working knowledge of radar principles, including the radar range equation, RCS, Doppler processing, CFAR, clutter, multipath, and multi-target tracking (e.g., Kalman filtering, data association). **Programming & Tooling:** Proficient in C++ and Python, with the ability to write production-quality code for radar data ingestion and processing on Linux. **Systems Troubleshooting:** Comfortable diagnosing issues across RF hardware, networking (TCP/UDP), timing, and software layers, and using lab equipment such as spectrum analyzers and oscilloscopes. **Independence & Ownership:** Resourceful self-starter comfortable owning ambiguous sensor problems end-to-end and spending meaningful time on the range in a fast-moving startup environment. **Compliance:** This position requires access to export-controlled information under ITAR. Only U.S. citizens are permitted. Must be willing to submit a background check. **Nice-to-Have** **C-UAS Radar Experience:** Hands-on experience with radars purpose-built for counter-drone or short-range air surveillance (e.g., Echodyne, Robin Radar, Blighter, RADA, or comparable systems). **Small-Target Detection:** Experience detecting and classifying Group 1 sUAS, including micro-Doppler signatures and discrimination of drones from birds and ground clutter. **Signal Analysis Tools:** Experience with MATLAB or NumPy/SciPy for radar signal and data analysis. **Sensor Fusion:** Multi-modal fusion experience combining radar with EO/IR, acoustic, or RF sensors. **Embedded & Real-Time Systems:** Experience with ROS/ROS 2, NVIDIA Jetson or other edge compute, FPGAs, or real-time signal processing pipelines. **Interoperability Standards:** Familiarity with formats such as ASTERIX, Cursor-on-Target, or SAPIENT for sharing radar tracks with C2 systems. **Defense Industry Background:** Experience in an ITAR or compliance-bound defense environment, or prior work at a defense contractor or with DoD customers. **Education:** BS/MS in Electrical Engineering, Physics, or a related field with a focus on RF, signal processing, or radar. **Clearance:** Active security clearance or eligibility to obtain one. A passion for building robots or engineering projects as a hobby. **Benefits** **Meaningful Early Equity:** You aren’t just an employee; you are a foundational owner. Your contributions directly drive the value of your stake in the company. **Direct Roadmap Influence:** Forget the bureaucracy of big defense. You will have a seat at the table, directly shaping our product and technology trajectory from day one. **Mission-Critical Work:** We don’t build for "what if." We build systems the Department of War actively needs to counter immediate, real-world threats. **The Builder’s Playground:** Work in a brand-new lab fully optimized for rapid prototyping, equipped with NVIDIA Jetsons, high-end scopes, and 3-D printers. **100% Employer-Paid Premiums:** We cover 100% of your medical, dental, and vision insurance premiums and cover 50% of healthcare premiums for your dependents. **Unlimited PTO:** We value results, not clock-watching. Take the time you need to stay sharp and recharge. **Zero Red Tape:** You have the autonomy to make technical decisions that would take months of committee approval at a larger firm. **Austin-Based Culture:** Join an onsite team in Austin, TX, where we prioritize high-bandwidth collaboration and rapid field-testing. **Relocation Assistance:** We want the best talent in the room. If you aren’t in Austin yet, we’ll help you get here, to make your transition to the Silicon Hills seamless.