GoKawiilThe Quiet Resurgence of RF Engineering
14 Apr, 2026
I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it was a quiet, non evolving field. The advice I heard early on, and that I watched a lot of other people follow, was to go into software. Machine learning, cloud infrastructure, web development. That's where the growth was, that's where the money was, and honestly, that's where most new graduates went (myself included at the time). I studied Information Systems in college, not electrical engineering. RF was nowhere on my radar.
But aerospace has a way of pulling you into hardware whether you planned on it or not. I started my career at NASA, building telemetry platforms, ETL pipelines, and spacecraft visualization tools. Pure software work. Then I moved to a private aerospace company. Much smaller than NASA (approx 130 employees at the time I joined), and it required me to wear a ton of hats to work on ground systems. That's where things shifted. When you're responsible for ground station services, even when most of it now is software defined you can't stay in the software lane entirely. I found myself doing link budget analysis, troubleshooting RF anomalies, and developing a working understanding of the RF hardware chain that I never expected to need.
That experience is part of why I've been paying attention to what's happening in RF more broadly. I've been feeling a shift over the past several years — more demand, fewer people, and more urgency from the companies I talk to. RF engineering is not only alive, it's rebounding in a significant way. I wanted to dig into whether my gut feeling here is actually backed by data, or if I'm just seeing what I want to see from inside the aerospace bubble.
What Actually Happened to RF
To be fair to the people who called RF a shrinking field, they weren't wrong, at least for a stretch. After the dot-com bust in the early 2000s, the telecom industry consolidated hard. Companies merged, manufacturing moved offshore, and a lot of RF design work either disappeared or got absorbed into a handful of large defense contractors. The broader electrical engineering job market stagnated. Electronic Design has documented this trend not just for RF, but across EE as a whole. I feel confident that if the field as a whole is shrinking, then the subfield of RF was also in decline.
And then software exploded. The engineers who might've gone into EE or RF design a generation earlier went down the software "FAANG" route instead. University enrollment in RF specific coursework drifted down. Though I'll be honest, hard numbers on this are annoyingly hard to find so this is more of my gut assumption. What we do know is that today, companies openly describe the difficulty of recruiting RF engineers, pointing to a generation that chose software over EE.
But here's the thing that gets missed in the narrative: it never actually went away. The defense sector has been keeping it alive this entire time. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, these companies never stopped hiring people who understand beam patterns, power amplifiers, and antenna design. The majority of RF engineering job postings have historically come from aerospace and defense. RF didn't die. It just receded from the civilian sector while quietly remaining essential to national security and defense.
So What Changed
... continue reading