About Us:
Forefront RF is a fabless semiconductor company developing breakthrough RF technology that radically simplifies RF front-end architectures for mobile and connected devices. Our long-term vision is to empower anyone to treat global connectivity as a commodity, effortlessly adding it to any device. We lead through innovation, solving our customers’ toughest challenges and enabling them to stay ahead by pushing the boundaries of RF design.
This role will offer you a unique opportunity to contribute to shaping our company’s future and disrupting the current marketplace.
Our Values:
Our values provide the quiet nudge that help us to be our best in every interaction.
- One team: We listen, share, and build solutions together. Collaboration is at the heart of how we work. We support one another, embrace challenges and fun, and celebrate collective success.
- Innovation with intent: We operate at the forefront of technology, building innovative pathways to the future that meets real customer needs.
- Solutions driven: We develop world leading manufacturable products that deliver effortless connectivity.
- Customer focused: We act with integrity, hold ourselves accountable, and are guided by a deep commitment to deliver customer focused solutions.
- Sustainable: We design for longevity and reuse - leveraging globally connected RF technology to extend product lifecycles and reduce waste.
Role Overview:
As we move from core technology development toward customer qualification and productisation, system-level architectural clarity has become critical. We are therefore expanding the CTO team with a RF Systems Architect who will play a central role in aligning RF design, algorithms, software, and test into a coherent, validated system architecture.
Key Responsibilities:
System Architecture & Technical Coherence:
- Own the end-to-end RF system architecture, from RFIC blocks and tuning through control, software interfaces, calibration, and test.
- Translate product and technical specification requirements (e.g. 3GPP) into clear system and sub-block specs, making design choices that support buildability, test, and reuse.
- Define and execute system analyses and feasibility studies aligned with Forefront RF’s technology roadmap.
Cross-Disciplinary Integration:
- Act as the technical bridge between RF design, algorithm development, embedded software, and test teams.
- Clarify ownership and interfaces, and ensure assumptions made in one area are understood and verifiable in others.
Validation Strategy & Correlation:
- Define how the system is validated, including simulation coverage, measurement plans, and coverage of key corner cases.
- Lead review and resolution of gaps between simulated and measured system performance.
Technical Risk Identification & Reduction:
- Proactively identify system-level risks and trade-offs, and drive alignment on mitigation plans.
- Support the CTO with a clear view of architectural uncertainties that affect schedule, yield, or customer performance.
Support to Productization & Customer Readiness:
- Ensure the system architecture supports customer use cases and integration needs.
- Contribute to customer-facing technical material and support system-level technical discussions with customers & partners.
Technical Leadership & Culture:
- Set the standard for clear, system-level engineering thinking and decision making.
- Promote structured technical reviews, clear documentation, and evidence-based decision making.
Requirements
About you:
You’re excited by the opportunity to work with breakthrough technologies.
You may thrive in this role if you have some or all of the following:
Technical Skills:
- Strong background in RF systems, RFICs, or RF module development in a commercial product environment.
- Proven experience working across multiple disciplines: RF design, algorithms, embedded software, and validation/test.
- Demonstrated ability to reason at system level, balancing performance, complexity, risk, and manufacturability.
- Experience defining system architectures, performance budgets, and RF specifications.
- Hands-on understanding of RF measurements, hardware/system debugging, and real-world non-idealities.
People Skills:
- Excellent system-level analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly across disciplines.
- Comfortable challenging assumptions and driving constructive technical debate.
- High sense of ownership for technical correctness and system integrity.
- Pragmatic mindset: focused on what can be built, tested, and delivered.
Nice to have:
- Experience with mobile RF front-ends and relevant standards (e.g. 3GPP, MIPI).
- Exposure to NPI, manufacturing, or production test considerations.
- Prior experience in a fabless semiconductor or start-up environment.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and pension contributions.
- Company Share Option Scheme.
- 25 days holiday + bank holidays.
- Weekly company lunches.
- Flexible work hours and remote work options.
- Private medical insurance
- Life assurance x 4
- Income protection
- Healthshield Cash plan
- Heka flexible benefits platform
We believe in equal opportunities
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other basis covered by appropriate law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.
Top Skills
What We Do
Forefront RF is spearheading a new approach to RFFE designs architectures in smartphones and wearables by replacing fixed frequency filters with a tunable alternative to reduce space, weight and cost.
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