What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Prototype Engineer position at Metrea?
Company Overview
Metrea delivers effects-as-a-service to national security partners across five domains and more than a dozen mission areas—including airborne ISR, electronic warfare, secure communications, aerial refueling, special mission aviation, aerial firefighting, and advanced simulation.
Wherever we operate, we build vertically integrated full stacks of capability—designing, building, and operating turnkey solutions that let customers scale capacity while benefiting from continuous cycles of innovation. With operators and engineers under one roof, we close the gap between lab and field—what we call connecting design with effect.
Metrea’s solutions are built for elegance: effective, efficient, and evolving. This approach enables our partners to do more with less and achieve outsized, asymmetric advantage against rapidly evolving threats.
Headquartered in Washington, DC, Metrea has facilities across the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and beyond.
Group Overview
Electromagnetic and Cyber Group (EM&C) is responsible for developing flexible and survivable advanced electronic warfare and secure communications equipment while providing the industry’s leading signals intelligence, electronic warfare, and cyber experts. Metrea specializes in signal classification, direction finding, advanced geolocation techniques, and waveform development including waveforms for MANET and LPI/LPD applications. Metrea also develops special purpose radios for government customers and licenses DF and geolocation solutions to multiple OEMs.
Position Summary
The Prototype Engineer is responsible for transforming research concepts into customer-ready prototypes by integrating reference implementations onto real-world hardware platforms. This role focuses on system integration, embedded development, and rigorous acceptance testing to ensure performance, reliability, and reproducibility. Acting as the bridge between R&D and field deployment, the Prototype Engineer owns hardware bring-up, lab and field testing, and optimization for real-time constraints, enabling RADLAB to deliver validated, high-performance radar solutions.
Role And Responsibilities
Our Firmware
Metrea’s single core value, “rooted in humility,” is supported by four key attributes: entrepreneurial, systematic, discerning, and over-deliver. These attributes, combined, form our Teammate Firmware, our culture. We explore these attributes during the hiring process when we grow our teams and continually support the growth of our culture. We are a hyper-collaborative, dynamically hierarchical organization united by a passion for what we do, how we do it, who we do it with, and who we do it for.
Work Authorization / Security Clearance
Metrea Advanced Signals (MAS) is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status or other characteristics protected by law.
Position Type and Expected Hours of Work
This is a full-time non-exempt position with typical working hours of Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Hours and work shifts may change in accordance with department and business needs. Exempt Employees must have the ability to be on-call and available, as business needs require.
Work Location
Victor, NY
Work Environment
This job operates in an office setting.
Travel
10%
Metrea delivers effects-as-a-service to national security partners across five domains and more than a dozen mission areas—including airborne ISR, electronic warfare, secure communications, aerial refueling, special mission aviation, aerial firefighting, and advanced simulation.
Wherever we operate, we build vertically integrated full stacks of capability—designing, building, and operating turnkey solutions that let customers scale capacity while benefiting from continuous cycles of innovation. With operators and engineers under one roof, we close the gap between lab and field—what we call connecting design with effect.
Metrea’s solutions are built for elegance: effective, efficient, and evolving. This approach enables our partners to do more with less and achieve outsized, asymmetric advantage against rapidly evolving threats.
Headquartered in Washington, DC, Metrea has facilities across the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and beyond.
Group Overview
Electromagnetic and Cyber Group (EM&C) is responsible for developing flexible and survivable advanced electronic warfare and secure communications equipment while providing the industry’s leading signals intelligence, electronic warfare, and cyber experts. Metrea specializes in signal classification, direction finding, advanced geolocation techniques, and waveform development including waveforms for MANET and LPI/LPD applications. Metrea also develops special purpose radios for government customers and licenses DF and geolocation solutions to multiple OEMs.
Position Summary
The Prototype Engineer is responsible for transforming research concepts into customer-ready prototypes by integrating reference implementations onto real-world hardware platforms. This role focuses on system integration, embedded development, and rigorous acceptance testing to ensure performance, reliability, and reproducibility. Acting as the bridge between R&D and field deployment, the Prototype Engineer owns hardware bring-up, lab and field testing, and optimization for real-time constraints, enabling RADLAB to deliver validated, high-performance radar solutions.
Role And Responsibilities
- Own system integration: adapt reference implementations to embedded hardware constraints while optimizing for latency, throughput, and power.
- Implement firmware and other embedded code to run R&D algorithms on target platforms.
- Build and execute lab and field acceptance tests using golden vectors; produce detailed demo and validation reports.
- Manage BOM, hardware bring-up, test rigs, bench testing, and CI/CD pipelines for hardware acceptance.
- Lead lab testing in coordination with FRANCISLAB Test and Evaluation Manager.
- Drive performance tuning, fixed-point/quantization tradeoffs, and real-time scheduling.
- Provide early feedback on practical constraints and assumptions to R&D and Head roles.
- Coordinate customer demos and collect integration feedback for iterative improvement in coordination with the FRANCISLAB Test and Evaluation Manager.
- BS in Electrical or Computer Engineering, or 8–10 years of equivalent industry experience, including at least 5 years in applied radar systems.
- Proven experience transitioning radar software from engineering models to deployed hardware platforms, including integration, testing, and validation.
- Strong systems engineering skills: embedded C/C , RTOS, and real-time constraints. Additional FPGA familiarity is a differentiator.
- Experience with hardware bring-up, test fixtures, lab measurement tools, and RF chamber testing for radar/ELINT/communications.
- Proficiency in debugging across software/hardware boundaries.
- Experience in creating acceptance test automation and CI/CD for hardware targets.
- Strong communication skills for reporting integration risks and mitigation strategies.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills for cross-functional team environments.
Our Firmware
Metrea’s single core value, “rooted in humility,” is supported by four key attributes: entrepreneurial, systematic, discerning, and over-deliver. These attributes, combined, form our Teammate Firmware, our culture. We explore these attributes during the hiring process when we grow our teams and continually support the growth of our culture. We are a hyper-collaborative, dynamically hierarchical organization united by a passion for what we do, how we do it, who we do it with, and who we do it for.
Work Authorization / Security Clearance
- U.S. Citizenship
- Ability to obtain and maintain a TS security clearance.
Metrea Advanced Signals (MAS) is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status or other characteristics protected by law.
Position Type and Expected Hours of Work
This is a full-time non-exempt position with typical working hours of Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Hours and work shifts may change in accordance with department and business needs. Exempt Employees must have the ability to be on-call and available, as business needs require.
Work Location
Victor, NY
Work Environment
This job operates in an office setting.
Travel
10%
Salary : $160,000 - $200,000