Radar/Sonar Systems Engineer

About the role

You will join a defense technology company building radar and sonar systems that find faint targets in heavy clutter, across air, surface, and undersea domains. The sensing team turns raw multi-channel array data into tracks a commander can trust, spanning waveform design, beamforming, adaptive processing, and multi-target tracking. Your algorithms decide what counts as a detection, how beams are formed and steered, and how tracks survive maneuvers, missed detections, and deliberate interference.

What you will achieve

• Design detection processing chains, including pulse compression and CFAR detectors, that hold false alarm rates below specification while lifting detection range by 10 percent or more.
• Implement digital beamforming for a multi-channel array, demonstrating sidelobe control and null steering against simulated jammers in the lab.
• Build multi-target tracking filters using Kalman and particle methods that maintain track continuity through maneuvers and missed detections.
• Prototype space-time adaptive processing that suppresses ground or sea clutter by 20 dB or better in recorded data trials.
• Deliver algorithm performance reports with ROC curves, Monte Carlo statistics, and clear margins against the system requirement set.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• You bring 2 to 5 years of experience in radar, sonar, or array signal processing algorithm development.
• You are strong in detection and estimation theory, including matched filtering, CFAR, and ambiguity analysis.
• You have implemented beamforming, direction finding, or adaptive processing on real or simulated array data.
• You code fluently in MATLAB and Python for algorithm prototyping, simulation, and data analysis.
• You understand tracking fundamentals such as data association, gating, and state estimation with Kalman variants.
• You can explain algorithm tradeoffs between detection performance, computational load, and latency to system architects.
• You have validated algorithms against recorded sensor data, quantifying detection and tracking performance with statistically sound methods.

Nice-to-haves

• You have accelerated signal processing code with CUDA or on FPGA targets.
• You bring experience with sonar propagation modeling or underwater acoustics.
• You have worked with recorded radar or sonar data from field collections or trials.
• You are eligible for a U.S. security clearance.
• You bring experience with real-time implementation constraints, including fixed-point effects and processing latency budgets.