DSP / SDR Receiver Engineer — Navigation & Communications

Role Summary

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

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.

Requirements

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.

About the Company

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.