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Urban Sky is a venture-backed aerospace startup designing, building, and operating stratospheric balloon systems for applications ranging from wildfire monitoring to urban mapping. The company works with government customers including the Department of Defense, NASA, and others, launching flight vehicles weekly.
You will own the RF domain across the entire company—every emitter, receiver, antenna, and communication link from the avionics boards on vehicles to ground stations. Urban Sky's flight platforms are dense RF environments with SATCOM, stratospheric command links, GNSS, software-defined radios, and emitters operating within feet of each other. You'll architect how all RF systems coexist, maintain link closure, and survive in crowded and contested environments.
Key responsibilities include:
- Review and optimize all emitting and receiving systems (SATCOM, command links, GNSS, SDRs), including board-level RF analysis with electrical engineers: layout, filtering, shielding, desense, and co-site interference mitigation
- Review and optimize antenna selection, design, and placement across the fleet (LOS CSS radios, SDRs, SATCOM terminals, GNSS)
- Own RF link budgets across all mission phases and geometries; validate with hardware-in-the-loop and field testing
- Architect ground station systems and multi-node relay/bent-pipe topologies (balloon-to-balloon, balloon-to-ground, payload-to-ground)
- Develop solutions for MIMO architectures, mesh data backhaul, and efficient routing topology
- Harden RF systems for contested environments: jamming resilience, GPS protection, graceful degradation
- Develop secure, encrypted networking standards for RF-borne data across vehicle, ground, and customer interfaces
- Lead RF integration and interference deconfliction for third-party payloads
- Evaluate RF-sensing partners and payloads
- Support spectrum planning, frequency coordination, and regulatory compliance (FCC, ITU)
The role is based at Urban Sky's Denver headquarters (4800 Race St) and is on-site. Travel is expected to support field campaigns, test flights, and customer integration.
QUALIFICATIONS:
- B.S. or M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Communications Engineering, or related field
- 7+ years of hands-on RF systems engineering across hardware and system levels, preferably in aerospace, satellite, tactical comms, or high-altitude platforms
- Deep understanding of RF propagation, link budgets, modulation and coding, and antenna design principles
- Board-level RF experience: able to find and fix desense and interference problems with a spectrum analyzer and schematic
- Hands-on test experience with spectrum analyzers, VNAs, signal generators, and antenna measurement
- Experience with software-defined radios and mesh or relay network architectures
- Working knowledge of secure communications (encryption, key management) as applied to RF links
- Strong scripting/analysis skills for link modeling and test automation
- Must be US Citizen or Permanent Resident
- Ability to obtain and maintain a US security clearance may be required for certain programs
- Must be located near Denver, CO or willing to relocate
Nice-to-haves: HABS, smallsat comms, or airborne relay experience; contested-environment or electronic warfare experience (jamming, GPS denial, LPI/LPD); ISM, L-, or S-band systems and adaptive modulation/coding; RF payload experience (direction finding, TDOA/geolocation, SIGINT, SAR); antenna simulation tools; active US security clearance.
