Senior RF Systems Engineer

Job ID: 2618403
Location: El Segundo, CA, US
Date Posted: 2026-10-26
Category: Engineering and Sciences
Subcategory: Systems Engineer
Schedule: Full-Time
Shift: Day Job
Travel: Yes - 10% of the time
Minimum Clearance Required: TS.SCI
Clearance Level Must Be Able to Obtain: TS/SCI with Poly
Potential for Remote Work: ORA_ON_SITE
Description
SAIC has an opening for a Space RF Payload subject matter expert (SME) with in-depth knowledge of digital signal processing, signals, remote sensing, mission analyses, and system engineering. You will provide subject matter expertise to support customer decisions with respect to contractors' development of spaceborne RF signal processing payloads, ground processing systems, and overall mission capabilities. You will work in customer facilities in El Segundo, CA, directly sitting with our customers to provide our support.
You will perform the following duties and "fun stuff":

• Responsible for acting as primary technical oversight for the development, build, verification and deployment of Space RF payloads, providing Government leadership, as needed, recommend course corrections to the payload design and build through delivery.
• Requirements generation.
• Evaluation and compliance assessments to generated requirements and requirements flow down.
• Concept design evaluation and analysis of alternatives.
• Assessments of Critical Technology Elements (CTE), Technology Readiness Assessments (TRAs) and Manufacturing Readiness Assessments (MRAs).
• Concept of Operations (CONOPS) development.
• Provide technical oversight of payload integration process onto candidate spacecraft.
• Provide technical oversight of transition to operations to include the development, operator training, payload initialization and checkout, and on-orbit operations.
• Responsible for assessing proposed payload design updates and understanding all performance and spacecraft impacts due to these updates.
• Responsible for performing assessments of risk reduction plans associated with improving the maturity of payload design and hardware.
• Responsible for working with contacts at prime and subcontractors to ensure work is on schedule and progressing.

Qualifications
This is you:

• Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering or a technical field such as Physics, Math, or Aerospace Engineering with 14 years or more of experience in relevant field or Master's degree in electrical engineering or a technical field such as Physics, Math, or Aerospace
• Engineering with 12 years or more of experience.
• Experience with spaceborne RF payloads, signal processing, signals, mission data processing.
• Ability to analyze, discover and find solutions for technical issues in relevant technology.
• Working knowledge of orbital mechanics and environmental effects on spaceborne RF payloads.
• Experience applying Systems Engineering principals to the execution of payload development, build and I&T onto spacecraft.
• Good communication skills to peers and customer leadership.
• Must have an in-scope security background investigation (T5 or SSBI), adjudicated for SCI eligibility and enrolled in the Continuous Evaluation program (if applicable).
• Must be willing to be nominated for access to Sensitive Compartment Information and Special Access Programs and willing to consent to a Polygraph examination.

Great additional background and skills:

• 16 years or more of experience with RF payloads.
• Experience with integration & test of spaceborne RF payloads onto spacecraft.
• Familiarity with DoW acquisition processes.
• Experience as a project manager on space payload program or IPT.
• Ability to generate link budgets for end-to-end space to ground Comm systems and / or RF Payloads.

Target salary range: $200,001 - $240,000. The estimate displayed represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience and other factors.
SAIC is a premier technology integrator providing full life cycle services and solutions in the technical, engineering, intelligence, and enterprise information technology markets. SAIC is Redefining Ingenuity through its deep customer and domain knowledge to enable the delivery of systems engineering and integration offerings for large, complex projects. SAIC's approximately 15,000 employees are driven by integrity and mission focus to serve customers in the U.S. federal government. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, SAIC has annual revenues of approximately $4.5 billion. For more information, visit saic.com. For information on the benefits SAIC offers, see .