Joachim Ender was born in Soest, Germany, in 1950. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Münster and received his diploma in mathematics in 1975. and joined the Research Institute for Radio and Mathematics (FFM) - now the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Technology - in 1976, where he worked on statistical theory of detection and estimation, phased array antennas, imaging radar, radar signal processing and the design and construction of experimental radar systems. 
He received his doctorate in electrical engineering from the Ruhr University Bochum. Since 1992, he has lectured on radar signal processing at the Ruhr University, where he was awarded the title of "Honorary Professor" in 2002. He has also lectured on radar techniques at RWTH Aachen University and the University of Siegen.

In 1999, he became head of department at FHR, where he coordinated research activities on various aspects of phased array radar and imaging radar. From 2003 to 2016 he was the director of FHR. He was awarded the Chair of High Frequency Sensing and Radar Techniques at the University of Siegen and continued to head Fraunhofer FHR. After his retirement, he works as a Senior Scientist at FHR and is a Senior Member of the ZESS at the University of Siegen. 
His current research focuses on: High-resolution SAR, super-resolution for sparse scenes, airborne and spaceborne multi-channel SAR with High Resolution Wide Swath (HRWS) capability and detection of moving targets on the ground with STAP and other approaches, bistatic SAR processing, development of compressive sensing algorithms, SAR/ISAR autofocus with compressive sensing methods and low rank matrix recovery, optimization of codes for MIMO radar systems and multi-beamforming for phased array radar for space surveillance.

Joachim Ender is the author and co-author of numerous publications and is a frequent reviewer for various international journals and conferences. He is co-founder of the European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar (EUSAR), which has been held every two years since 1996. He received the "GRS-S Transactions Prize Paper Award of the year 2006", the "Group Technical Achievement Award - For contributions to Array Signal Processing and Multichannel Synthetic Aperture Radar" as well as the "Best Paper Award" and the "Most Cited Article of the Year" for a journal publication on Compressive Sensing from EURASIP. In 2014, he was named an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to multichannel synthetic aperture radar and radar array signal processing". In 2021, he received the "Christian Hülsmeyer Award" from the German Institute of Navigation "in recognition of his outstanding contributions to radar research and education". In 2023, he was appointed ITG Fellow by the German Electrical Engineering Association (VDE) "for his outstanding merits, commitment and scientific achievements in the field of radar technology". He recently received the 2023 Pioneer Award from the AESS "for seminal pioneering contributions to multichannel Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)".