Electrical Engineer, Optical Communications

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and integrate communication PCBAs, modulators, and devices for airborne or space-based platforms
• Architect and implement SDR-based communication pipelines including modulation, encoding, and signal processing
• Develop high-speed optical communication links including link budgeting, pointing, tracking, and alignment strategies
• Perform system-level trade studies for high-speed optical links
• Design and validate end-to-end communication chains from data streams to optical front-ends
• Collaborate with avionics, firmware, and compute teams to integrate systems into flight hardware
• Develop test infrastructure for lab and field validation, including over-the-air and optical link testing
• Analyze performance under real-world conditions such as noise, interference, Doppler, and atmospheric turbulence
• Own documentation, interface definitions, and system performance metrics

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Physics, or related field
• 3+ years of experience in RF systems or communications engineering
• Strong fundamentals in communication theory
• Experience designing PCBAs for communication systems
• Experience with software-defined radio platforms
• Hands-on experience with RF lab equipment (spectrum analyzers, signal generators, VNAs, oscilloscopes)
• Familiarity with link budgeting and system-level performance analysis
• Experience working across hardware and software boundaries

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with high-speed optical communication systems or photonics
• Background in avionics or aerospace systems
• Experience with real-time DSP implementation on FPGAs, GPUs, or embedded systems
• Familiarity with SDR frameworks and low-level radio hardware
• Understanding of atmospheric effects on RF and optical propagation
• Experience with pointing, acquisition, and tracking (PAT) systems
• Knowledge of antenna systems or optical beam steering
• Experience working within SWaP constraints for flight systems

About the Company

Cowboy Space Corp. is building the infrastructure to power and connect the orbital economy. Our satellites operate in Low Earth Orbit to collect sunlight and enable a new class of capabilities, from powering on-orbit compute to delivering secure, high-bandwidth optical data.