--- title: 'Wireless Software Engineer at Specter' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/wireless-software-engineer-specter-san-francisco-zvjchm89fzv0' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-07' --- # Wireless Software Engineer at Specter - **Company:** Specter - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-08-31 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/specter/702586cc-1a00-4fd0-89ed-2207f0d0095b ## 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 Wireless Software Engineer to own the wireless software stack across our distributed mesh sensor network, spanning radio configuration and control on the device, fleet-wide telemetry and diagnostics, and the tooling our RF team uses to design, deploy, and debug real sites. ## RESPONSIBILITIES: - Design, implement, and maintain the wireless software running on Specter's deployed edge devices, including radio configuration and control, channel and power management, QoS policy, rate control, and the device-side interfaces for remote node interrogation. - Own fleetwide telemetry and diagnostics: collect, transport, store, and analyze per-link statistics across hundreds of deployed nodes, enabling remote diagnosis of link degradation. - Integrate and characterize vendor wireless chipsets, drivers, and firmware including driver-level failure modes and engineering around vendor limitations we do not control. - Debug complex issues spanning radio, driver, kernel, and application layers; determine root causes and instrument systems for future diagnostics. - Collaborate closely with RF, Hardware Engineering, Embedded Software, and Backend teams to co-design interfaces, support new radio platforms, and ensure strong connections between wireless performance and end-to-end video quality and latency. - Build and maintain automation and tooling for fleet operations, including monitoring, alerting, configuration management, and targeted recovery processes. - Develop RF simulation and deployment planning tools for real site design, including propagation modeling, channel assignment, and capacity estimation. - Support field deployments through bring-up, site characterization, and post-deployment debugging, feeding insights from real-world behavior back into the design process. - Contribute to the wireless foundations underpinning Specter’s next generation of autonomous and robotic platforms, such as drone communications and distributed node coordination. ## WHAT YOU'LL BRING - Strong software engineering fundamentals, with fluency in Python and at least one systems language such as C, C++, Go, or Rust. - Extensive Linux experience, including systemd services, working within the networking stack, and operating headless remote machines over SSH. - Deep understanding of WLAN standards, including Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) MAC protocols, WFA protocols, and coexistence with other wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, UWB and cellular. - Familiarity with the Linux wireless userspace: cfg80211/nl80211, hostapd, wpa_supplicant, and the related drivers. - Experience with telemetry or data pipelines: collecting, storing, and querying operational data. - Solid grasp of networking fundamentals across the whole stack from drivers up through application layer. - Solid understanding of embedded system design principles, including memory estimation, resource allocation, power management, and performance optimization. - Experience building and debugging distributed or networked systems. - Proficiency with wireless performance analysis using tools such as Wireshark, logging frameworks, and low-level tracing. - Hands-on experience debugging hardware/software interactions using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, protocol analyzers, and embedded logging tools. - Ability to work at the hardware/software boundary, including reading datasheets, driver source, and register maps. ## NICE TO HAVE - Experience with sub-GHz wireless, 802.11ah, or mesh networking. - Deep architectural understanding of LTE/5G Protocol Stacks (NAS, PDCP, RRC, RLC, MAC, PHY) and 3GPP specifications. - Familiarity with embedded interfaces (UART, I2C, I2S, SPI, CAN, PCIe, etc.). - Exposure to Video pipeline: encoder control, RTP or QUIC transport, and an understanding of the impact of packet loss on perceived quality. - Familiarity with software-defined radio, signal processing, or spectrum analysis tools. - Experience with time-series data infrastructure and observability tooling. - Previous work with field-deployed hardware, where environmental and software issues both affect reliability. - Understanding of QoS concepts and data path optimization algorithms. ## 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 - [Software Engineer - Applied AI](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-applied-ai-specter-san-francisco-p7er9310dx06) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Antenna Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-antenna-engineer-specter-san-francisco-xea2760wvrkw) — 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