---
title: 'Senior Antenna Engineer at Specter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-antenna-engineer-specter-san-francisco-xea2760wvrkw'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Senior Antenna Engineer at Specter

- **Company:** Specter
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/specter/22439786-c652-421f-a7b5-6eb3b87a4580

## Job description

Company Background Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world.

Today, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment.

Our co-founders Xerxes and Philip are passionate about empowering our partners in the fast approaching world of physical AI and robotics. We are a small, fast growing team who hail from Anduril, Amazon, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.

## The Role

Specter is hiring a Senior Antenna Engineer to own the radiating hardware at the edge of our wireless platform; every antenna on every sensor, access point and mothernode we ship. The 1 km wireless range our customers depend on is bought at the antenna, and so is the reliability of the video link that rides on it.

This is a hands-on role with end-to-end ownership: architecture, electromagnetic simulation, prototyping, chamber measurement, certification support, and the correlation between what the model predicted and what a deployed fleet actually does in the field.

## What you'll own

- Lead antenna architecture, design, simulation, prototyping, integration, and validation for ground-based and airborne products.
- Develop antennas for sensors, access points, and mothernodes across technologies such as sub-GHz mesh (902–928 MHz), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, command-and-control, LTE, CBRS, and GNSS
- Drive full-wave electromagnetic simulation in HFSS, CST, or FEKO: modeling enclosure, radome, chassis, and nearby structures, and correlating predicted performance against measured hardware
- Design antennas into severely constrained enclosures shared with cameras, compute modules, batteries, cabling, and four other radios
- Develop multi-radio isolation and coexistence strategy
- Build out antenna measurement capability end-to-end: return loss, impedance, isolation, efficiency, gain, radiation patterns, polarization, and total radiated performance across bench, chamber, and installed configurations
- Close the loop from simulation to chamber to field, using link telemetry from hundreds of deployed nodes to make predicted performance match installed performance
- Drive antennas into production: supplier specification, tolerance and variation analysis, incoming inspection criteria, and the measurements that catch a bad build before it ships
- Root-cause RF performance issues spanning antenna, radio, mechanical, and environmental domains, using simulation, bench measurement, chamber data, and field telemetry

## WHAT YOU'LL BRING

- Bachelor's or higher in electrical engineering, applied physics, or electromagnetics.
- 5+ years designing antennas for production hardware : you've taken at least one antenna from concept through measurement, certification and volume manufacture.
- Genuine electromagnetics: radiation mechanisms, impedance and matching, efficiency versus directivity, polarization, coupling, ground-plane and counterpoise effects, and the size–bandwidth–efficiency trade for electrically small antennas.
- Fluency in a full-wave EM simulation tool such as HFSS, CST, FEKO or an equivalent platform.
- Hands-on measurement experience using VNA, spectrum analyzer, signal generator, and chamber work.
- Experience designing into mechanically constrained products such handsets, wearables, IoT devices, vehicles, drones, robots, or mobile devices.
- Comfort with multi-radio platforms and the isolation, coexistence and desense problems that come with them.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to multidisciplinary stakeholders.
- Ability to operate with significant autonomy, prioritize effectively, and drive technically complex programs to completion.

## NICE TO HAVE

- Master’s degree or PhD in electrical engineering, electromagnetics, applied physics, or a related field.
- Sub-GHz or ISM band experience (902–928 MHz, 868 MHz), or other work where the antenna is a large fraction of a wavelength.
- FCC Part 15 certification experience, particularly the intentional-radiator rules and the antenna-gain / conducted-power relationship.
- Experience specifying, commissioning or operating an anechoic chamber or antenna range.
- Outdoor and industrial hardware: radomes, environmental sealing, pole and mast mounting, temperature and ingress qualification.
- Scripting for measurement automation and data analysis such as Python or MATLAB.
- Field measurement experience: site surveys, installed-performance characterization, propagation measurement.
- Working directly with antenna suppliers, contract manufacturers and certification labs.

## About Specter

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Specter builds and deploys long-range wireless sensing networks with AI-powered real-time alerts and semantic search, creating the perception layer for the physical world.
- **Entity Type**: Private (funding stage not publicly disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: Not publicly available (likely US based on website language and job postings)
- **Founded**: Not publicly available
- **Founders**: Not publicly available

## Core Business
- Primary industries: Physical security, critical infrastructure monitoring, industrial IoT, real-time situational awareness
- Target customers: Enterprise and government – including energy companies, data centers, construction firms, ports, stadiums, industrial facilities, and campuses
- Mission statement: "Creating a Software Defined Physical World" – providing instant awareness through real-time alerts, semantic search, and a map-based view of every event

## Products & Services
- **Specter Platform**: A SaaS-based physical intelligence platform that ingests data from long-range wireless sensors (video, thermal, acoustic) and applies general AI (natural language alerts) to detect events such as unauthorized access, safety hazards, equipment anomalies, fires, spills, and perimeter breaches. Features include semantic search, live and historical event detection, and complete situational awareness dashboards.
- **Long-Range Wireless Sensing Network**: Proprietary hardware and software for rugged, wide-area coverage without trenching – deployed across refineries, deserts, offshore platforms, construction sites, and other harsh environments.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue not publicly available; company is actively hiring (Software Engineer – Systems listing) and has a live product across multiple industry verticals.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly available
- **Growth Signals**: Recent website updates as of June 2026; expanding to new use cases (energy, data centers, construction, ports, stadiums); job openings indicate scaling engineering team.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Long-range wireless sensing** that eliminates blind spots without trenching or on-site personnel – a differentiator for remote and harsh environments.
- **General AI with natural language alerts** – users set and query alerts in plain English, lowering the barrier for security and operations teams.
- **Multimodal sensing** (video, thermal, acoustic) combined with real-time analytics for high-fidelity event detection (e.g., PPE compliance, spills, equipment theft, person-down incidents).
- Focus on **critical infrastructure** where downtime or security gaps carry high stakes, creating deep vertical-specific moats.

## Strategic Focus
- Expanding horizontal deployment across energy, data centers, construction, logistics, and campus security.
- Deepening AI capabilities through real-time semantic search and event detection to replace traditional CCTV monitoring.
- Building a “software-defined physical world” that unifies disparate sensors into a single intelligent layer.

## Why Work Here
- Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI + IoT systems that monitor real-world infrastructure at scale.
- Engineering culture likely emphasizes distributed systems, computer vision, edge computing, and high-reliability software (based on job description for Software Engineer – Systems).
- Fast-paced startup environment with a clear product-market fit across multiple verticals.
- Remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated; job posting does not specify location, but likely offers flexibility.

## Sources
1. [specter.co](https://specter.co/)
2. [specter.co/product](https://specter.co/product)
3. [specter.co/industries](https://specter.co/industries)
4. [specter.co/features](https://specter.co/features)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com - Software Engineer – Systems](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/specter/fe26a690-7934-46f4-bce2-8d8c5495a0dc)

## Other roles at Specter

- [Wireless Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/wireless-software-engineer-specter-san-francisco-zvjchm89fzv0) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer - Applied AI](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-applied-ai-specter-san-francisco-p7er9310dx06) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer — Fleet](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-fleet-specter-san-francisco-5tm2vh5drfnf) — San Francisco, CA
- [Platform Site Reliability Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/platform-site-reliability-engineer-specter-san-francisco-c9mhsvjd32qq) — San Francisco, CA
- [Recruiting Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-coordinator-specter-san-francisco-y4c4fq3ctm2y) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding Deployment Strategist](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-deployment-strategist-specter-san-francisco-81ba238x3y8m) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Accounting Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-accounting-manager-specter-san-francisco-c560c7hymx09) — San Francisco, CA
- [Hardware Test Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/hardware-test-engineer-specter-san-francisco-0tgzpmm9kqx3) — San Francisco, CA
- [Hardware Test Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/hardware-test-lead-specter-san-francisco-m6ynp7p1kq82) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-recruiter-specter-san-francisco-rx0h3svbzxxs) — San Francisco, CA