Staff Software Engineer, Flight

Company Overview:  

At Relativity Space, we have two audacious goals: to build the next great commercial launch company with Terran R and to become America's leading force in additive manufacturing innovation. Both contribute to our long-term vision of creating humanity’s industrial base on Mars, paving the way for interplanetary life to expand the possibilities of the human experience. This journey begins right here on Earth – where we design, build, and fly rockets to deliver customer payloads to orbit. Terran R, our medium-to-heavy lift reusable rocket, fulfills the growing demand for launch capacity, thanks to our iterative approach that accelerates design, testing, and development while minimizing costs. While our groundbreaking research and development in 3D printing pushes the boundaries of large-scale additive manufacturing.

Your journey with us is more than just a job – it’s an opportunity to shape the future of aerospace technology, additive manufacturing, and the human experience alongside a community of passionate, creative individuals. Join us on this extraordinary journey, as we work together to transform our vision into reality.

Team:  

Relativity is seeking a highly motivated Senior/Staff Software engineer to join the Flight Software team.  This position is part of a software organization with top talent from diverse industries (automotive, aerospace, industrial automation and FAANG) that works closely with Avionics, Guidance Navigation and Control, Propulsion, Test Operations, and many partner teams to define and deliver real time and mission critical flight software for Terran R.

What you’ll do: 

As a Staff Flight Software Engineer, you will have a major role in the full life cycle of Flight Software from gathering requirements, defining architecture, development, integration to the commissioning and support of test and launch operations.

• Define and refine software requirements and design criteria with partner teams.
• Write concise documentation such as Concept of Operations, Interface Control Documents, and Software Design Documents.
• Architect and deliver core flight software with a strong focus on meeting system and performance requirements such as latency, allowed jitter, and control frequency.
• Work closely with GNC engineers to integrate complex algorithms for vehicle ascent and re-entry, descent and landing.
• Work closely with Embedded Software Engineers and Avionics to integrate vehicle sensor data such as GPS, IMU, Radar, and to control vehicle equipment such as valves, thrust vector controls, and landing grid fins.
• Develop telemetry system that prioritizes, filters, stores and forwards, and encodes/decodes telemetry to RF format, and routes that data through ground stations and to data centers.
• Support the development and integration of testing infrastructure such as HITL (Hardware-In-The-Loop) and HOOTL (Hardware-Out-Of-The-Loop) and physics and fluid sims.
• Build automated unit, integration and system level tests in CI/CD.
• Focus on maximizing the team's velocity by defining processes, best practices, integrating modern tools and technologies, and mentoring junior engineers.

 

What you need to know:  

 

• An undergraduate or graduate degree in a relevant engineering discipline (Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering).
• Deep professional experience and technical expertise delivering production-level embedded software.
• Excellent verbal and communication skills.
• Expert in Rust, C++, and/or other system languages.
• Expert in algorithms and data structures.
• Expert with developing real time embedded applications.
• Expert in Operating System concepts such as memory management, CPU shielding, scheduling, etc.
• Experience with software development processes including: source control, bug tracking, and CI/CD.
• Demonstrated experience working collaboratively in cross-functional teams.

 

Nice to haves but not required:  

 

• Experience with developing software to a safety standard and achieving formal certification with a governing body (e.g. NASA, FAA, FDA, etc.).
• Familiarity with performing Hazard Analysis, FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) and Root Cause Analysis, and familiarity with FDIR (Fault Detection Isolation, Recovery) concepts.
• Experience with developing fault and failure tolerant system and knowledge of voting and internal state synchronization.
• Experience with micro-service architectures.
• Experience with systems-level programming like synchronization primitives, memory management, etc.
• Experience with different inter-process communi