About this job

Sapienza Consulting, a Serco company, is recruiting an RF Payloads Plus Microwave & Mmwaves Technology & Equipment Engineer for Sapienza to work on our Customers Site (ESA-ESTEC).

Sapienza has been a partner of ESA for almost 30 years, and we pride ourselves in supporting a wide range of missions including Galileo, MTG, Copernicus and ExoMars. Our team is international with activities across the U.K., the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

The candidate will be assigned to the Payload Engineering section (TEC-EFP) with the role of “RF PAYLOAD ENGINEER” and will work in one or more of the following domains:

• RF and Microwave Remote Sensing Instruments for Earth Observation;
• RF Navigation Payloads;
• RF Satellite Communication Payloads.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to internal R&D activities for the design, modelling, architectural trade-off and performance assessment of advanced RF and microwave instruments for Earth Observation, and/or navigation payloads, and/or satellite communication payloads, with main emphasis on payloads based on digital signal processing and active antennas.

• Perform technical management of R&D activities with industry/institutions in the field of advanced payload concepts and sub-systems/equipment development.
• Provide expert RF payload technical support to ESA projects and programmes.
• Contribute to the generation and promotion of innovative ideas for future satellite missions in the field of RF payloads, including the definition of ESA R&D programmes.
• Define technical requirements and statements of work for R&D activities to be performed by industry, from early conceptual studies to full hardware development.
• Carry out computer simulations at system/subsystem level for the assessment of end-to-end payload and instrument performance:

• Contribute to the development/usage of section related laboratory facilities and analysis/simulation tools:
• Maintain state-of-the-art expertise by monitoring the RF/Microwave systems technological trends and applying them in the day-to-day tasks.

Profile

• Master’s degree or equivalent qualification in Telecommunications, Microwave or RF Electronics Engineering or a related discipline.
• At least 4 years of relevant work experience on design, development and testing of Radio Frequency Payloads in the domain of Navigation and/or Earth observation and/or Telecommunications.
• Knowledge and Experience on the following topics are considered an asset:
• Radio frequency and microwave payloads technologies based on active phased array antennas.
• Transmit/Receive Modules for microwave payloads.
• Digital signal processing units, and experience on payloads based on digital signal processing.
• End-to-end payload performance and signal quality analysis.
• State-of-the-art RF analogue and (high-speed) digital signal processing techniques and technologies.
• Software and simulation tools and programming (Matlab/Simulink, ADS/VSS, C/C++, Python).
• Promoting cooperation and team-working, problem solving.
• Excellent interpersonal skills are needed, together with a high degree organizational and communication abilities.
• Comfortable with working in a diverse and multinational team environment.
• Fluent in English; knowledge of another ESA member-state language is an asset.
• Candidates must be eligible to work in the EU