Nahum Shahaf earned a Master of Physics degree from Bar-Ilan University in 1977. Throughout most of the 1980s, he worked on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which Israeli journalist Amnon Lord described as placing Shahaf "among the leading developers" of the technology. According to his curriculum vitae, Shahaf worked primarily on UAV optical tracking systems, before shifting his focus to missile systems and inventing over the next decade. In 1997, he received an Israeli Ministry of Science award for creativity for his work on compressed digital video transmission.