RF Applications Engineer

Banner Lane is delighted to be working exclusively with a high-growth, Shrivenham-based RF and optical telecoms business to recruit an RF Applications Engineer. This is a genuinely exciting opportunity to join a close-knit, technically excellent team at a pivotal point in the company's growth.

The opportunity

Our client is an innovative SME operating across satellite ground stations, broadcast, defence, SIGINT/COMINT, and secure communications markets. Following several years of strong growth — revenues have grown from £11m to £19m since 2022 — the business is expanding its Applications Engineering function to keep pace with an increasing volume and complexity of customer enquiries across the UK, EMEA, the Far East, and the US.

This hire brings the Applications Engineering team to three people. It's a newly created position designed to ensure the business has the technical resource to support sales at pace, without disrupting longer-term R&D programmes.

The role

This is a customer-facing technical role. As the trusted technical advisor to the sales teams and their customers, you'll be responsible for understanding customer requirements, designing system solutions — predominantly from the company's range of optical telecoms products — and engaging directly with customer technical teams to build confidence in those designs.

You won't be developing new products; you'll be solving customer problems quickly and effectively, working across multiple concurrent enquiries in a fast-moving, varied environment.

Day-to-day responsibilities include:

• Engaging with customers to understand requirements and develop concept designs
• Working with internal subject matter experts to produce detailed design packs
• Coordinating system design reviews with internal and external stakeholders
• Delivering presentations and demonstrations from architectural evaluation through to design completion
• Supporting factory acceptance testing and guiding installation teams through deployment
• Feeding market intelligence into product management to influence future roadmap decisions

What they're looking for

Our client is open on background. The key requirement is solid RF engineering fundamentals — candidates do not need prior optical experience, as both current members of the team came from RF backgrounds and found it a natural fit.

Essential:

• Strong RF engineering background — cellular, comms, defence, or similar
• RF systems design capability; the ability to understand a problem and design a system to solve it
• Whole-system thinking across state-of-the-art telecoms architectures
• Around 5 years' experience, though capability matters more than tenure
• Comfortable engaging confidently with customers on technical conversations, including on the fly
• Quick, responsive, and able to juggle multiple workstreams simultaneously

Desirable:

• Prior customer-facing or sales support experience
• Familiarity with engineering quality management processes
• Circuit design knowledge (though hands-on circuit design is not part of the role)

Important: Due to the nature of the products and customer base, candidates will be exposed to ITAR and UK export controls. A Sole UK National is preferred.

The culture

Despite now sitting within a major defence group, our client has retained full SME autonomy, agility, and personality. Engineers here regularly describe the variety of work, pace, and ownership as reasons they joined from larger organisations. The business holds Gold Investors in People status and reinvests consistently in both its people and facilities.

This role suits someone who sees engineering as more than a job — curious, commercially aware, dynamic, and energised by variety over depth.

Package and hours

• Highly competitive base salary
• Company bonus scheme — 8%, paid out consistently for 5+ years
• Employer pension contribution of 6.5%
• Option to purchase additional annual leave
• Tax-efficient share purchase plan
• Cycle to work scheme
• Employee assistance programme
• Annual summer and Christmas events plus regular team socials

Flexible working hours with a condensed Monday–Thursday pattern and an early finish on Fridays.