Wireless Software Engineer

Company Background

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

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

• 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.