DSP / SDR Receiver Engineer — Navigation & Communications (Contract)

About Us:

Swan delivers the future of defense and industry through scalable autonomous products. Swan is backed by leading defense VCs including a16z's American Dynamism fund.

DSP / SDR Receiver Engineer - Navigation & Communications

We are looking for a DSP / SDR engineer to help design, implement, and test software-defined radio receivers for navigation and communications applications. The role is focused on signal-processing receiver design: acquisition, tracking, synchronization, Doppler estimation, timing recovery, and real-time processing of RF signals.

The ideal candidate has hands-on experience building receiver signal-processing chains for GNSS, satellite communications, radar, wireless PHY, spectrum monitoring, or related RF systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement SDR receiver algorithms for real-world RF signals.

• Develop acquisition, tracking, synchronization, and measurement-generation pipelines.

• Estimate Doppler, carrier phase, timing, delay, and signal quality metrics.

• Work with SDR platforms such as USRP/UHD, GNU Radio, RFSoC, or FPGA-based systems.

• Analyze collected RF data and debug receiver performance in lab and field environments.

• Evaluate waveform structure, modulation, channel behavior, and receiver implementation tradeoffs.

• Support navigation and communications experiments using GNSS, LEO satellite downlinks, or other opportunistic signals.

Desired Background

Strong candidates may come from one or more of the following areas:

• GNSS / PNT receiver design

• Satellite communications modem or PHY development

• Radar signal processing

• Electronic warfare, ELINT, SIGINT, or spectrum monitoring

• Wireless PHY / LTE / 5G baseband processing

• Real-time SDR or FPGA-based signal processing

Useful Skills

• SDR development with GNU Radio, USRP/UHD, RFSoC, or FPGA SDR platforms

• Real-time DSP implementation

• Signal acquisition and tracking loops

• PLL / FLL / DLL design

• Doppler estimation and tracking

• Carrier recovery and timing recovery

• Matched filtering and correlation-based detection

• Frame synchronization and preamble detection

• OFDM, TDMA, DVB-S2/DVB-S2X, or other modem PHY experience

• GNSS observables such as pseudorange, carrier phase, Doppler, clocks, and ephemerides

• Navigation filtering, EKFs, factor graphs, or INS/GNSS integration

• Python, C/C++, MATLAB, or similar signal-processing tools

Ideal Candidate

The strongest candidate combines practical SDR implementation experience with deep receiver signal-processing intuition. They should be comfortable working with imperfect real-world RF data, debugging acquisition/tracking behavior, and turning signal-processing algorithms into working receiver software.

Experience with GNSS, LEO satellite signals, satcom downlinks, radar, EW, SIGINT, or wireless PHY systems is especially relevant.