Datalink Integration & Test Engineer – Communications / MANET (all genders)

About Us

STARK is a new kind of defence technology company revolutionizing the way autonomous systems are deployed across multiple domains. We design, develop, and manufacture high-performance unmanned systems that are software-defined, mass-scalable, and cost-effective. This provides our operators with a decisive edge in highly contested environments.

Were focused on delivering deployable, high-performance systems—not future promises. In a time of rising threats, STARK is bolstering the technological edge of NATO Allies and their Partners to deter aggression and defend Europe—today.

About the team

As a Datalink Integration & Test Engineer , you will play a key role in bringing together complex software systems that power our next generation of autonomous platforms.

Your mission

Your mission is to take established, proven MANET (mobile ad-hoc network) radio systems and make them work — reliably, repeatably, and under real-world constraints — inside our unmanned platforms. In this role you focus on the datalinks for our close- and short-range loitering effector and ISR systems, where the link has to stay solid through fast-moving, time-critical mission profiles in contested airspace. You own the path from 'commercial radio in a box' to 'integrated, tested, mission-ready datalink.'

This is a hands-on integration and test role at the boundary of RF hardware, networking, and platform architecture. You own two connections that have to hold up when it counts: the command-and-control link between UAV and ground control station (GCS), and the mesh that lets multiple effectors operate as a coordinated swarm. You arent just wiring in a radio; you are certifying that command and control survives contact with the real world, and giving the engineering team the hard data to trust it.

Responsibilities

Integration

Integrate established MANET / mesh radio systems (e.g., Silvus StreamCaster, Persistent Systems Wave Relay, Rajant, Radionor) into STARKs platform architecture across the mechanical, power, RF, and network/software interfaces.

Define and implement the integration approach for each datalink — antenna placement, RF front-end, IP networking, and interfacing with the autopilot and payload stack.

Integrate and configure the UAV-to-GCS command-and-control link, ensuring reliable telemetry, control, and video across the full mission profile through to the terminal phase.

Set up and tune multi-node mesh topologies that enable UAV-to-UAV connectivity and coordinated swarm operation of multiple effectors, including relay and self-healing behaviour.

Work closely with hardware, autopilot, and systems engineering to ensure the communication subsystem is correctly matched to the platform and its constraints.

Test & Validation

Design and execute structured test campaigns — bench, hardware-in-the-loop, and field trials — to validate datalink behaviour.

Characterise link performance across throughput, latency, range, mesh routing behaviour, and resilience under interference and degraded conditions.

Validate swarm behaviour at the network level — multi-node mesh scaling, UAV-to-UAV and UAV-to-GCS connectivity, relay hops, and graceful degradation as nodes join, move, or drop out.

Build up repeatable test procedures and instrumentation, and produce clear, traceable documentation of setups, methods, and results.

Collaboration & Continuous Improvement

Translate field and test findings into concrete integration and configuration improvements.

Support trade-offs and selection decisions between candidate datalink systems with measured, defensible data.