RF Payload Engineer - Space Antenna (gn) @ DefenceTech Venture, Munich

This is an Atlantic portfolio company. Who we are We are a stealth space defence company. Our mission is to keep order in orbit. Just as fighter jets secure the skies and navy ships secure the seas, we are building the systems that will protect the assets above us: the satellites our economies, security, and daily lives depend on. Space has become contested. As orbit fills with infrastructure and threats alike, Europe needs sovereign means to deter, defend, and uphold law and order beyond the atmosphere. We are at the stage where the first hires define what the company becomes. Today, the team is the three founders, building the first systems, setting the technical direction, and proving the mission. The next people to join will be among the company's first employees. They will not be joining an existing machine. They will help build one. That means real authorship. The architecture, the engineering culture, the operating rhythm, and the standard of execution are still being formed. For the right person, this is the opportunity to help shape a European space defence company from its earliest days. We are looking for mission-driven people who want to defend the high ground, and who are ready to have honest debates about the use of force in space, its limits, and its ethics. Your Role & Responsibilities You will help build the RF payload that flies on our first spacecraft. That means designing a new RF payload that sweeps broad frequency ranges and steers its beams in a phased-array manner, operating across the ISM bands and the main space communication bands (S, X, Ku, Ka). Your work will determine whether the payload radiates and receives cleanly, points where it is told to, survives launch and orbit, and ultimately performs when it matters. The payload has to fly in roughly 18 months. It is also built to last: the hardware you design must stay useful for years after launch, with new algorithms and waveforms uploaded via software patch. Think of it as software-defined hardware, a Swiss army knife in orbit whose blades we will keep adding to long after it leaves the ground. This is one of the first engineering roles. You will work directly with the three founders and have significant influence over core technical decisions from day one. You will not be handed a mature RF architecture to maintain. You will help create it, integrate it, test it on the ground, and evolve it into a flight-ready system. The work will be broad and practical. One day you might be laying out the array geometry and simulating beam patterns. The next you could be routing an RF PCB, characterising a phase shifter chain on the bench, chasing down spurious emissions, evaluating amplifier suppliers, or preparing the payload for environmental testing. This role requires a lot of curiosity and self-management. There is no established process to follow and no one to hand you a fully specified task. You will need to identify what matters, go and…