Radio System Engineer in London

Helsing is a defence AI company. As democracies, we believe we have a special responsibility to be thoughtful about the development and deployment of powerful technologies like AI.

Every platform we build has to talk to something, a ground station, a network, a seeker, another aircraft and it has to keep talking when someone is actively trying to stop it. As an RF Engineer on the Physical Products team, you'll design and integrate the radio frequency systems that make our platforms work in the real, contested electromagnetic environments they're built for, not a clean lab bench.

You will work across the full chain, from antenna and front-end design through to link budgets and EW resilience, and you'll be hands-on: designing, building, testing, and fixing real RF hardware, not just modelling it.

The day-to-day:

• Design and specify RF front-ends, antennas, and associated hardware, reasoning through gain, bandwidth, efficiency, size, and cost trade-offs for a given platform and mission.
• Own link budget analysis for communications, telemetry, and/or seeker/radar systems, translating range, data rate, and reliability requirements into a defensible RF architecture.
• Work on resilience to a contested electromagnetic environment, jamming, spoofing, and interference and design systems that degrade gracefully rather than fail outright.
• Integrate RF systems into the wider electrical architecture, managing grounding, shielding, and EMC considerations so RF performance survives contact with the rest of the platform.
• Get hands-on with RF test equipment, spectrum analysers, VNAs, signal generators to characterise, debug, and validate real hardware, not just simulate it.
• Work closely with electronics, software, and systems engineers to ensure RF subsystems integrate cleanly with power, structure, and the rest of the avionics stack.
• Support field testing of RF and communications systems, including range trials and EW/interference testing, and feed real-world results back into the design.
• Produce clear documentation, link budgets, test reports, interface definitions, that the rest of the team and our customers can actually rely on.

You should apply if you:

• Have designed and integrated RF systems in a professional engineering context, ideally within aerospace, defence, or another demanding, safety-critical domain.
• Understand RF fundamentals deeply enough to reason from first principles, propagation, antenna theory, link budgets, modulation schemes, noise, and interference.
• Have hands-on experience with RF test and measurement equipment, and are comfortable debugging real hardware, not just simulation output.
• Have worked on systems that need to survive a contested or degraded RF environment, or can reason confidently about what that requires even without direct experience.
• Can interpret complex datasheets and specifications for RF components (amplifiers, filters, mixers, antennas) and translate them into sound design decisions.
• Collaborate effectively across disciplines, electronics, software, systems and communicate clearly in written and spoken English.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with electronic warfare (EW), signals intelligence, or counter-UAS RF systems.
• Experience with radar or seeker RF front-end design.
• Familiarity with SDR (software-defined radio) platforms and associated toolchains (GNU Radio, MATLAB RF toolbox, or equivalent).
• Experience with antenna design and simulation tools (e.g. HFSS, CST).
• Exposure to relevant standards and spectrum regulations for defence or aerospace RF systems.

Join Helsing and work with world-leading experts in their fields. Helsing's work is important. You will face unique Engineering and AI challenges that make a meaningful impact in the world. Our work frequently takes us right up to the state of the art in technical innovation, be it reinforcement learning, distributed systems, generative AI, or deployment infrastructure.

What we offer:

• Competitive salary and VSOP options.
• Relocation support: up to 2,500 and 4 weeks temporary accommodation.
• Learning: 500/450 yearly allowance.
• Health & wellness: gym membership and mental health support (Nilo.health).
• Social: regular company events and monthly social allowances.
• Enhanced parental leave: 22 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers & 6 weeks for secondary caregivers.
• Family support: 5 days of paid family emergency leave, 100% remote work option during pregnancy and phased return to work.
• A hands-on onboarding program (affectionately labelled "Infraduction"), in which you will be building tooling and applications to be used across the company.

Helsing is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability or gender identity.