RF System Hardware QA Engineer - Test Validation And Production Handover

Location: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Working Pattern: On-site, 5 days per week

Type: Permanent, full-time

Salary: Competitive tax-free package, dependent on experience

Relocation: Full relocation support, visa sponsorship and family status available

Company: Established defence technology developer (name shared at first conversation)

Tektora are supporting an established defence technology client in Abu Dhabi who design and build RF systems for military use. They are hiring a senior hardware quality engineer to sit between the RF, firmware, FPGA and software teams and the production line, and to be the person who decides whether a product is actually ready to hand over.

To be clear on what this is not: this is not a software QA or test automation role. There is no Selenium, no test framework ownership, no CI/CD pipeline. This is a hardware and RF systems test engineer's job — bench instruments, multi-discipline fault finding, BOM and first article inspection, and production support.

Relocation to Abu Dhabi is required. This is an on-site development and manufacturing environment. The package is tax-free, relocation is fully supported, and the client has relocated engineers and their families from Europe and Asia onto this programme before.

This role would suit

A hardware or RF test and validation engineer with 10+ years in product development who is as comfortable at a spectrum analyser as in a BOM review, who has taken military equipment from prototype through first article inspection into production, and who can hold both the micro view (why this one board fails at temperature) and the macro view (why this system architecture will cause support problems in three years).

The Role

You will verify quality and system readiness for handover to operations, and own the long-term supportability view of the product. Day to day that means characterising and validating multi-discipline systems spanning RF, power, electronics and software; identifying weaknesses in a system and planning the mitigation rather than just logging the defect; working closely with the hardware, RF, firmware, FPGA and software development teams to identify configuration issues and drive corrective action; and generating bills of materials, running first article inspection and standing by production to resolve manufacturing issues as they arise.

Key Experience Required

• Bachelor's degree in Electronic or Computer Engineering
• Minimum 10 years in a comparable hardware or RF test, validation or product quality role
• Prior experience in military equipment development — this is a firm requirement
• Measurement and characterisation with lab equipment including spectrum analyser, network analyser, signal generator, thermal camera, multimeters and data capture
• Good working understanding of multi-discipline systems covering RF, power, electronics and software
• Able to collaborate closely with hardware, RF, firmware, FPGA and software development teams
• Able to identify potential issues in a system configuration and action corrective measures
• Bill of materials generation, first article inspection and production standby for manufacturing issues
• Working with operations on product handover and long-term support
• Working with Altium — reading, interrogating and marking up schematics and PCB layouts
• Detail-oriented, self-directed, able to work under pressure and to firm deadlines
  
  

Desirable Experience

• NVIDIA Jetson modules and/or FPGA
• Python, MATLAB or C++
• Experience with jammers, spoofers or other electronic countermeasures — a significant advantage
• A software or coding background alongside the hardware
• Cadence AWR
  
  

Interested?

Send your CV through and we will come back to you with the client name, the programme detail and the full package before anything is submitted anywhere. Candidates will be screened for nationality and location eligibility against the client's own requirements at the first conversation — we will be straight with you about that up front rather than waste your time.

Tektora — defence, aerospace and secure communications recruitment across the UK, Europe and the UAE.

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