RF Systems Integration Engineer

DS creates systems that power the next generation of radio spectrum intelligence. We collect radio data from all over the world, train neural networks to decipher it, and run them on the smallest chips we can. We’re solving a new, technically hard problem where nothing from other fields works out of the box, and along the way, we’ve built our own stack from scratch, including entirely new embedding model architectures, custom GPU kernels, and much more. Joining DS means owning major parts of a fast-growing AI research organization, joining a collaborative, talent-dense team with decades of experience in probabilistic ML, accelerated computing, embedded systems, and signal theory, and growing your career in the areas that interest you. You’ll fit in if you want to come to work for the problem itself and don’t want to choose between technical rigor, business value, and real-world impact. We work with high ownership and trust, and we do it together in the office 5 days/week. Distributed Spectrum is building a passive RF sensing system for maritime domain awareness and related mission areas. The system is not a single piece of software or hardware. It is a stack: sensors with embedded compute and RF hardware, a datapath and processing pipeline, a sensor management and command-and-control layer, and a user-facing interface. Making all of that work together, reliably, in a lab and in the field, is the job of the Systems Integration Engineer. This role is genuinely split between lab and field. Some of the time you are in our facility in New York, building test infrastructure, running integration tests, and chasing down bugs. Some of the time you are in the field, deploying sensors, running experiments, and operating the system in the kinds of conditions our customers will encounter. WHAT YOU WILL WORK ON Lab Integration and Test - Build and maintain the hardware-in-the-loop test infrastructure for validating end-to-end system behavior. This is the framework that catches failures the component-level and software tests miss. - Define and execute integration test plans for new hardware variants, carrier board ports, and sensor software releases. - Own the post-manufacturing QA process for sensors built at volume. As the manufacturing ramp scales toward hundreds of units, this process needs to be fast, repeatable, and ruthless about quality. - Root cause failures at the intersection of firmware, hardware, RF, and network infrastructure. You will not always own the fix, but you will own understanding what broke and why. RF Data Generation / Simulation Harnesses - Data generation pipelines and frameworks to support both hardware-in-the-loop and simulated test environments - Frameworks tying physics-based modeling (off the shelf and custom) into custom data generation and analysis. - Collaborate deeply across disciplines—including Machine Learning, Embedded Software, and RF Systems—to build the tools and collect the data needed to develop and test our systems. Field Operations and Data Collection - Deploy sensors in the field for experiments and customer demonstrations. This includes physical installation, network configuration, and validation that the system is performing as expected in its deployed state. - Operate the system during data collection runs and live demonstrations. You are the person who knows the difference between normal system behavior and a bug in the field. - Collect, log, and preserve data from field experiments in a form that lets the engineering team analyze it back in the lab. - Bring field observations back to the engineering team in a structured way: what worked, what did not, what conditions we have not yet tested. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR - Experience integrating hardware and software systems, ideally in embedded or sensor-heavy contexts. You understand what happens between the hardware driver and the application, and you have debugged problems at that boundary. - Comfort with Linux system administration and netwo