Engineering Roles
Hardware & Embedded Systems Engineer
In this role, you’ll design the FPGAs, ASICs, mixed-signal boards, and RF front ends that form the hardware foundation for classified mission systems. Whether you’re building a high-performance beamformer, laying out a sensor receiver, or architecting an embedded real-time OS, your work moves from theory and simulation to lab validation to mission deployment. You make the algorithms real in hardware that must perform under pressure.
The Work
Hardware engineers own the silicon and the boards that the rest of the work depends on. The physics is unforgiving: RF interference is real, power budgets are tight, signal integrity matters at speed, and the systems you design have to operate in contested environments where failure has mission consequences. You’ll work with Verilog or VHDL to implement DSP pipelines on FPGAs. You’ll use MATLAB and embedded C to bring up firmware on real-time operating systems. You’ll lay out mixed-signal PCBs where the analog section and the digital logic must coexist without crosstalk. You’ll spend time in the lab measuring, not theorizing: in RF chambers and on oscilloscopes, protocol analyzers, and spectrum analyzers. Sometimes you’ll validate against live signals you cannot discuss.
You’re solving problems at the margin—signal integrity, power budgets, real-estate margins—where a clever design choice in hardware unlocks a 10x speedup in the algorithm or cuts power consumption in half. Those choices compound across the system, the program, and other projects that reuse your designs.
You’re solving problems at the margin—signal integrity, power budgets, real-estate margins—where a clever design choice in hardware unlocks a 10x speedup in the algorithm or cuts power consumption in half. Those choices compound across the system, the program, and other projects that reuse your designs.
Who You Work With
You’ll work with the RF engineers who designed the antenna arrays and receiver paths your FPGA processes, algorithm researchers who optimized the beamforming math, and software engineers who turn your hardware-software co-design into operational code. You’ll sit at the intersection of their worlds. You’ll brief the team on what your hardware does, what it costs in power and area, where it’s fast, where it’s slow. Sometimes that feedback cascades back into the algorithm. Sometimes it means rearchitecting a board. That coupling—hardware and software as co-equal players, not a hardware team answering to software—is structural at STR.
What We Look For
FPGA design in Verilog or VHDL, embedded firmware in MATLAB and C on real-time operating systems, and mixed-signal PCB design where analog and digital must coexist; hands-on lab characterization with RF and signal-integrity instrumentation is valued.
Open Positions
Ready to find your place?
Browse every open position for this role across all capability areas and all U.S. locations.
