Careers at Kapta Space: Teams, Pay and How to Get Hired

The team you'd join

Nine openings. Ten current employees. A radar payload that has never flown.

Kapta Space is building its founding engineering team around a metamaterial electronically scanned array for spaceborne moving-target indicator missions — hardware with no catalog equivalent. That reality shapes every hiring decision at this two-year-old Seattle startup. The next nine hires will nearly double the company; every open role is engineering, onsite in Redmond or Seattle, with a salary band of $163k–$273k (median $236k) and a seniority mix that skews 89 percent senior or principal.

| Discipline | Representative open roles (Sept 2026) | Seniority level |

|------------|----------------------------------------|-----------------| | RF / Microwave | Principal RF/Microwave Engineer | Principal | | Antenna | Principal Antenna Engineer | Principal | | Radar systems | Principal Radar Engineer–MTI, Director – Radar Payloads | Principal, Director | | FPGA / Digital | Senior FPGA Engineer | Senior | | Embedded firmware | Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer | Senior | | Mechanical / Structural | Senior Mechanical Engineer | Senior | | Hardware engineering | Director of Hardware Engineering – Spaceborne Radar Systems | Director | | Manufacturing | Director of Manufacturing – Spaceborne Radar Payloads | Director | | Radiation effects | Lead Radiation Effects Engineer | Senior | | PCB design | Senior PCB Designer | Senior | | Program management | Senior Technical Program Manager | Senior |

Radar payload development and RF hardware concentrate in Redmond; the Director of Manufacturing role is also posted in Redmond. A candidate joining today enters a small team where a principal engineer may be the only person in their discipline. Cross-functional ownership is explicit in the job descriptions: the Principal Antenna Engineer, Principal Radar Engineer–MTI, and Lead Radiation Effects Engineer all work on the same array.

The "Kapta Talent Community" posting has been open for six-plus months, signaling a pipeline strategy for roles that don't yet have a requisition. Hiring velocity (roughly two new roles per week, doubling month over month) indicates the founding team is moving from architecture into build and test.

Compensation: what the numbers mean

Kapta's compensation structure reflects a seed-stage hardware company that needs senior specialists who can ship flight hardware. First-party job board data shows the same salary band across 12 salaried roles, median $236k. The band is wide because the roles span individual-contributor principals and directors who own entire subsystems. Every posting carries the same disclaimer: the range reflects base pay only and varies by experience, education, specialized expertise, and business needs.

The top of the band clusters around $275k for director-level radar and antenna roles, positions that carry end-to-end payload responsibility. Principal individual-contributor roles in FPGA, radar signal processing, and manufacturing sit in the $215k–$250k range. The floor, $160k, appears only on the Senior Technical Program Manager posting; every other engineering role starts at $185k or higher.

Equity is granted to all full-time roles. The company describes "competitive equity grants that reward innovation, impact, and long‑term growth" within a philosophy "designed to recognize excellence while fostering a culture of collaboration, curiosity, and shared success." No strike prices, vesting schedules, or percentage ranges are published, typical for a 10-person company that raised a $5 million seed round in February 2025 led by MetaVC Partners with Entrada participating. At this stage, equity value is tied to the next priced round or an exit.

Benefits listed in public postings include medical, dental, vision, basic and supplemental life insurance, and paid parental leave. There's no published 401(k) match, tuition reimbursement, or equity refresh policy.

The philosophy is straightforward: pay senior cash to attract people who have already built and flown radar hardware, then align them with equity that only pays off if the company delivers on its SAR payload roadmap.

Inside the hiring loop

Kapta runs recruiting internally — no external agencies without a signed agreement. The careers page directs recruiters to email [email protected] if they want to engage.

The front door has two paths. Candidates can apply to a specific open role (currently Director of Manufacturing, Senior Technical Program Manager, Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer, Senior FPGA Engineer, Principal Antenna Engineer, Principal RF/Microwave Engineer, or Senior PCB Designer) or join the Kapta Talent Community, a standing pipeline for "individuals to submit a resume for consideration to future employment openings as they come available." The community posting notes that if you're considered for an opportunity, Kapta will reach out with the job description and compensation.

First filter: export compliance. Every posting carries the same ITAR language: U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents (green card holders), refugees, asylees, or persons eligible to obtain required authorizations from the State or Commerce Departments. The Director of Manufacturing role adds a further gate: eligibility to obtain and maintain an active Top Secret/SCI clearance. That requirement isn't boilerplate; spaceborne radar payloads sit squarely in the classified programs where Kapta is targeting work. If you can't clear ITAR, the process stops here.

The company states it "may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. All final hiring decisions are made by humans."

Technical evaluation comes next. The research doesn't publish a step-by-step interview loop, but the role requirements imply the shape: Principal Antenna and RF/Microwave Engineers will face design reviews on phased-array or SAR payloads; FPGA Engineers will discuss radiation-tolerant architectures and timing closure on space-grade parts; Embedded Firmware Engineers will walk through bare-metal bring-up and fault-tolerant state machines; the PCB Designer will show stack-ups that survive vibration and thermal cycling. The Senior Technical Program Manager and Director of Manufacturing roles demand evidence of transitioning hardware from development to rate production, including yield improvement, cycle-time reduction, and data-driven operating cadence.

Disqualifiers beyond ITAR and clearance: applications submitted through unsolicited agencies, and candidates who can't work on-site in Redmond or Seattle. The postings are explicit: "On-site," "In-Office," "Full Time, Permanent." Remote isn't an option for hardware integration and test.

The loop closes fast. With ten employees and a founding team that includes the hiring managers, a candidate who clears the technical review typically meets the founders quickly. The offer follows human deliberation, not an algorithm. If you're in the Talent Community, the timeline is less predictable, since you wait until a role opens that matches your discipline. But the bar doesn't lower: the same ITAR, clearance, and technical-depth requirements apply whenever the call comes.

Two sites, one payload

Kapta operates across the Seattle metro. LinkedIn lists the headquarters as Seattle with 2–10 employees as of 2023; the job board shows five senior engineering roles posted in Redmond, roughly 15 miles east: Director of Radar Payloads, Principal Antenna Engineer, Senior FPGA Engineer, the principal radar MTI role, and Director of Hardware Engineering. That directorship is likewise listed for Redmond.

The Redmond facility must support the full metamaterial antenna development loop. The Principal Antenna Engineer posting calls for ownership of metamaterial antenna design, simulation, and measurement from concept through flight qualification. The Senior FPGA Engineer role covers architecture, RTL development, and verification of high-speed digital signal processing for radar payloads. The Principal Radar Engineer MTI (Moving Target Indicator) role focuses on signal processing algorithms for ground and air target tracking.

The Director of Manufacturing posting is explicit: "Develop and execute the manufacturing strategy to support current programs and future production growth," "establish a scalable production-readiness process for new products," and "transition from prototype production to higher-rate manufacturing without compromising reliability." The role owns DFM/DFA/DFT partnership with engineering, lean manufacturing for "medium-to-high volume, high-complexity space hardware," and KPIs including first-pass yield, cycle time, rework, scrap, and warranty costs. The posting also flags "long-lead, obsolete, constrained, or single-source components."

The two sites are linked by a hardware handoff still being defined. The Director of Manufacturing is charged with "partner[ing] with Engineering to improve DFM/DFA and accelerate the transition from development to production."

What no public filing discloses is square footage, lease terms, or whether either site is a dedicated build-out versus subleased flex space. What is documented is the technical work that dictates the minimum viable facility. Candidates should ask in the interview loop which capabilities exist today versus which are on the capital plan.

The profile that lasts

The people who last at Kapta Space share a specific profile: they have built radar hardware that shipped, they understand the defense acquisition landscape well enough to navigate ITAR without hand-holding, and they treat "first time in space" as a constraint to engineer around rather than a research topic to explore.

The founding team sets the bar. Milton Perque spent years as Chief Engineer at Echodyne, where the company produced thousands of metamaterials-based electronically steered arrays for counter-UAS systems backed by hundreds of millions in private investment. Adam Bily designed antennas at Astranis and Apple before co-founding Kapta. Their hiring signal is explicit: "We're taking something that's mature and productized for the counter-UAS radar sector," Bily told Business Insider, "and we're applying it to some of the needs within the spaceborne radar, Earth observation, imaging, and tracking sectors." That translation — ground-proven metamaterials radar to spaceborne GMTI — is the company's entire technical thesis.

Perque has said the company is "reaching out to the combatant commands and trying to understand if there are certain priorities or key capability gaps that we could service." Engineers who have worked DARPA SBIRs, interfaced with NRO or Space Force program offices, or delivered hardware to a prime's integration facility will ramp faster. The ITAR restriction — U.S. citizenship, permanent residency, or protected status required — is a hard filter, not a preference.

The pace is set by an in-orbit demonstration target: at least two, possibly three satellites that must track moving objects and transfer custody between themselves. "GMTI is incredibly challenging, and it has never existed in space at scale," Perque told SpaceNews. The team that pulls this off will have designed, built, and tested the payload, bus interfaces, and ground segment, all built out from a basement start in 2022.

Karen Roter Davis, an investor and board observer, framed the hiring need directly in a September 2026 LinkedIn post: "If you're an exceptional engineer, builder, or technical leader who wants to work on advanced spaceborne radar missions that have never existed at scale, you may want to take a look at our open positions."

Kapta's median salary band of $236K reflects the scarcity of engineers who can operate at this intersection of metamaterials RF, space systems, and defense program execution and who want to do it in a ten-person company.

The through-line: production radar experience, defense program literacy, comfort with undefined interfaces, and a bias toward hardware over analysis. The company selects for engineers who have already failed and recovered on a flight program — because the problems Kapta is solving don't have textbook answers.

Nine engineers will join the team in Redmond over the coming months. The payload they build has no catalog number. The people who last will be the ones who've already flown hardware through the environments Kapta is now commissioning its labs to simulate.

Working in space? Zero G Talent tracks the openings: see every open Kapta Space role, browse space jobs, the companies hiring, and the people building the field.