Radar Engineer at 9 Mothers in Austin, TX

Job description

Location: Onsite — Austin, TX Employment Type: Direct Hire, Full-Time Job Title: Radar Engineer About 9 Mothers The modern battlefield has changed. Cheap, autonomous suicide drones have turned the tactical advantage upside down, and the world is looking for a solution. At 9 Mothers, we aren’t just "innovating"—we are building the shield. Backed by top-tier investors, we develop AI powered machines designed to intercept and neutralize Group 1/sUAS threats in real-time. Our flagship product is a low-power, counter-drone system built for the edge—on vehicles, at bases, or in a soldier's pack. Why 9 Mothers? While others build for "awareness" or "long-term research," we build for the immediate survival of those in harm’s way. We are a team of hackers, engineers, and mission-driven builders who value field-ready capability over polished slide decks. If you want to see your code or hardware in the field next month—not next year—this is your playground. Position Summary 9 Mothers is hiring a Radar Engineer to own the radar sensing layer of our counter-sUAS kill chain. In this role, you will integrate and tune radars from multiple vendors so that their detections and tracks feed cleanly into our platform—alongside our passive acoustic (Vor) and in-house visual detection stack—giving Edda and future systems an earlier, more reliable picture of incoming threats. You will own the full radar lifecycle: characterizing sensors, writing the software that ingests and processes radar data, tuning radar configurations for performance against small, fast, low-RCS targets in cluttered environments, and validating that performance on the range. This role sits at the intersection of RF engineering, embedded and real-time software, and systems integration in a fast-moving defense startup environment. Essential Duties Radar Characterization: Run bench and range characterization of the radars we field (e.g., FMCW, pulse-Doppler, electronically scanned arrays) to verify vendor performance claims and establish baselines for tuning. Radar Integration: Integrate multiple radar models into our counter-drone platform, including mechanical/electrical interfaces, timing and synchronization, coordinate-frame alignment, and vendor SDKs, APIs, and data protocols. Software Development: Design, build, and maintain the software that configures radars and ingests, filters, and publishes their detections and tracks to the rest of our system in a reliable, low-latency manner. Performance Tuning: Tune radar parameters—waveform and mode selection, detection thresholds, CFAR, clutter maps, Doppler filtering, and track initiation/maintenance—to maximize probability of detection and minimize false alarms against small, fast sUAS in real-world environments. Sensor Fusion Support: Work with the perception and controls teams to fuse radar tracks with acoustic and EO/IR data, and to cue our visual tracking and effectors from radar. Testing & Validation: Build and execute test plans, including simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and live-flight range testing with our UAS pilots, and establish metrics for detection range, track quality, latency, and false-alarm rate. Field & Customer Support: Support radar setup, site surveys, and tuning during customer demonstrations, pilots, and field deployments, troubleshooting issues from the RF front end through the software stack. Documentation: Produce and maintain integration documentation, interface control documents (ICDs), tuning guides, and test reports for internal teams and external partners. Requirements Radar Experience: 5+ years of hands-on experience as a radar engineer, radar systems engineer, or similar role, including work with more than one radar type or vendor. Integration Track Record: Demonstrated experience integrating radars into larger systems (vehicles, fixed sites, C-UAS, air defense, autonomy, or similar) and taking that integration through to fielded use. Tuning & Optimization: Proven experience tuning radar config