Cellular Test Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL (NOW HIRING)

PRhobe, Inc.

RF Hardware Engineer

RF Hardware Design Lead | Orinda, CA | Full-time, W-2 | Mid to senior — we hire and title to fit

ABOUT PRHOBE

PRhobe is rebuilding the economics of logistics tracking. Our patented RIoT device attaches to a pallet, container or trailer, reads RFID tags on the goods around it, and reports item-level location and condition to the cloud — cutting the cost of a tracked item journey from roughly $50 to $0.50. A $1.25M NSF SBIR Phase II award will take RIoT from evaluation hardware to certified, field-deployed product, with further funded scope expected soon. The NSF funding, combined with private financing, is expected to provide sufficient capital to take us beyond commercial product launch.

THE ROLE

You own the RIoT electronics. Today RIoT is a working evaluation platform built from commercial modules. Your job is to consolidate it into a single manufacturable PCB carrying cellular, UWB and a passive RFID reader, hitting our target size, weight, cost, power budget and reliability, powered by a LiPo cell that has to last ten years inside a shipping container.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

•  Schematic, PCB and RF design. Take a cellular IoT reference design to a production RIoT board — stripping evaluation features and integrating a UHF passive RFID reader module, its reader antenna. Achieving robust RF performance while co-locating UHF RFID, LTE-M/NB-IoT and UWB on a manufacturable PCB is the central technical challenge. Design for EMC and certification from the outset.

•  Power architecture. Design for a decade on a single LiPo cell: software-controlled load switching that fully depowers the RFID front end in standby, eliminating idle draw on every rail, with wake paths driven by motion or a low-rate timer. Off-the-shelf parts may not do this; expect to design the switching yourself.

•  Energy harvesting. Evaluate and integrate motion energy harvesting with capacitor storage and managed transfer to the battery, plus fallback power-saving strategies.

•  Mechanical fit. Work with our industrial design consultant to validate antenna, RFID and UWB placement inside the rugged IP67/IP69K enclosure while protecting the battery cavity.

•  Manufacturing handoff. Produce the hardware design package, the final costed BOM against an aggressive unit target and the manufacturing test strategy, and support bring-up, debug and revisions through build and test.

WHERE YOU WILL FLEX

The boundary between this role and firmware is porous by design — the power switching only works if the two are designed together, and you will read and write embedded C to prove your own board works. Engineers who can move toward firmware or RF test as the program demands will find more room here.

WHAT YOU BRING

We are open on level — we title to fit. A smart engineer with 5-10 focused years interests us as much as a fifteen-year senior.

•  AI fluency — mandatory. You use Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok or equivalent daily and have multiplied your own throughput, on the order of 10x or more rather than a marginal gain. Be ready to walk us through what you delegate, what you deliberately do not, and how you verify.

•  5+ years designing mixed-signal, multi-radio PCBs, including one you took from blank schematic through bring-up into production.

•  Demonstrated low-power design at the microamp level — sleep-current budgeting you did yourself, and measured.

•  RF layout discipline: impedance-controlled routing, matching networks, antenna placement, isolation between co-located radios.

•  Experience debugging mixed-signal hardware using oscilloscopes, VNAs and logic analysers.

•  LiPo systems — charging, protection, fuel gauging, realistic capacity modeling over temperature and years.

•  Altium, Cadence, KiCad or equivalent, and comfort working directly against a mechanical CAD model.

•  Comfortable writing and debugging embedded C to bring up new hardware independently.

•  Handing designs to contract manufacturers — DFM, DFA, EVT, DVT, PVT and BOM cost engineering against a unit target.

•  BSEE or equivalent practical background.

NICE TO HAVE

•   Automotive-grade part selection (AEC-Q100/Q200); extended-temperature and cold-chain-capable sensing for pharma/food distribution.

•   Nordic/Qualcomm/ST or comparable cellular IoT module design.

•   UHF passive RFID reader module integration (Impinj, JADAK/Novanta, Chainway, Silion or similar).

•   Energy harvesting circuits (Kinetron, EnOcean, Cymbet, Micropelt); IP67/IP69K sealed enclosure design.

COMPENSATION, BENEFITS AND LOCATION

Full-time W-2. $115,000–$142,000 depending on level and experience, set against the labor rates approved under our federal award. 401(k) with 6% employer match; 90% employer-paid medical, dental and vision. Based in Orinda, CA, at our facility walking distance from BART; remote and hybrid arrangements within California open to discussion. Expect travel to customer sites, contract manufacturers and accredited certification laboratories.

WHY THIS IS WORTH YOUR TIME

•   Generous equity, and a market that justifies it. Early-stage equity is inherently uncertain. What we can say are the targets: ~$10 trillion global logistics (tracking) and $30 trillion product inventory. Taking tracking from $50 to $0.50 while creating the real-time inventory category is a change we expect to work at a scale with no natural ceiling.

•   Ownership, and it ships. You own your discipline, and your name goes on the patents you earn. Funded, with customers waiting on pilots — your work will be deployed to customer pilots inside a year.

PRhobe is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on any protected basis. Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States. This role is federally funded; daily contemporaneous time recording against project charge codes is a condition of employment.