Radio Frequency (RF) Design Engineer - Entry to Expert Level (MD Location)

Are you someone interested in all things RF? Is your idea of a good time building out a better ham radio? Do you enjoy logical analysis of complex tasks? If so, RF Engineering, a core component capability development activity within NSA, may be for you! NSA's highly technical RF workforce keeps pace with RF advances and enables NSA to address threats to our Nation and our Allies by supporting worldwide Signals Intelligence requirements of our military commanders and national policymakers.

The NSA is seeking talented colleagues to join world class team of analysts, engineers, researchers and developers who work on projects using antenna and receiver design, RF signals analysis, end-to-end system design, and emitter location and direction finding techniques in order to design, develop and deploy advanced survey and collection capabilities to propel our mission.

At NSA, RF Engineers develop the technologies, communications and capabilities to maintain our global advantage in both information gathering and national defense. RF Engineers acquire target signals, condition them for follow-on processing and deliver end-to-end solutions for survey, collection and emitter location and follow on analysis. Use your unique experience and expertise to protect national security interests!

RF Engineers can be directly hired to support a mission organization or into the Radio Frequency Development Program (RFDP). The RFDP is a three-year full-time paid development program for junior RF engineers to develop and expand skills while making meaningful contributions to NSA's mission. This talented group will have the opportunity to take part in customized mentoring, professional development and world-wide travel while sampling a breadth of RF engineering activities.

As an RF Engineer, your responsibilities can include:

- Design, build, test and deploy end-to-end RF systems, from the antenna through follow-on processors.

- Design, build, test and deploy communications systems using commercial off the shelf (COTS)/government off the shelf (GOTS) radios, software-defined radios (SDR) and SDR frameworks, as well as field programmable gate array (FPGA) technologies.

- Design, develop, construct, test and maintain hardware and software processing components; typically subsystems of communication, collection, processing or analysis systems.

- Conduct RF site surveys and include results in the design and performance assessments of RF systems.

- Work with and/or lead project teams to satisfy operational requirements for RF systems.

- Analyze results of RF collection in support of national mission requirements

- Lead new advances in RF engineering and push the leading edge of RF communications technologies:

- Antenna theory, design, and fabrication techniques with particular focus on beam-forming technologies - Modulation (BPSK, QPSK, spread spectrum, etc.), demodulation and signal separation techniques

- Low power, space and cooling environments (including embedded systems)

- Commercial telecommunication standards, protocols and topologies

- Compression and other bandwidth optimization techniques

- RF interference detection and mitigation approaches

- Active RF techniques

- Low probability intercept (LPI) and low probability of detection (LPD) techniques

- Service-oriented architectures