Principal Automation & Controls System Engineer

At Relativity Space, we’re building rockets to serve today’s needs and tomorrow’s breakthroughs. Our Terran R vehicle will deliver customer payloads to orbit, meeting the growing demand for launch capacity. But that’s just the start. Achieving commercial success with Terran R will unlock new opportunities to advance science, exploration, and innovation, pioneering progress that reaches beyond the known.

Joining Relativity means becoming part of something where autonomy, ownership, and impact exist at every level. Here, you're not just executing tasks; you're solving problems that haven’t been solved before, helping develop a rocket, a factory, and a business from the ground up. Whether you’re in propulsion, manufacturing, software, avionics, or a corporate function, you’ll collaborate across teams, shape decisions, and see your work come to life in record time. Relativity is a place where creativity and technical rigor go hand in hand, and your voice will help define the stories we’re writing together. Now is a unique moment in time where it’s early enough to leave your mark on the product, the process, and the culture, but far enough along that Terran R is tangible and picking up momentum. The most meaningful work of your career is waiting. Join us.

About the Team: 

The Tooling and Factory Automation team sits at the intersection of design, manufacturing, and automation, making everything from large-scale structural fixtures to small tools that directly enable Terran R’s production. As a design group embedded within the manufacturing organization, we dig deep into the needs of our internal partners to understand root problems, propose solutions, and deliver hardware to help build faster, scale smarter, and work better. The team is also at the forefront of Relativity’s growing factory automation efforts, an increasingly critical part of scaling production of Terran R at existing and future facilities. You’ll have the autonomy to make decisions, field solutions, and see them in action on the factory floor. Ultimately, you’re not just designing tools or automated processes; you’re defining how rockets and factories get built.

About the Role:

As a Principal Automation Control Systems engineer, you will be responsible for the technical leadership and growing a team dedicated to building and expanding factory automation within the manufacturing organization.  Additional responsibilities include architecting automation solutions for the manufacturing organization. The projects you work on will provide solutions across the factory ranging from quick turn interim development setups to large permanent infrastructure.  You will work in collaboration with mechanical, manufacturing, and design engineers to develop solutions tailored to a broad range of applications and manufacturing processes.  Once your hardware is built, you will also own implementation, working closely with technicians, operators, and end users - including writing and debugging control software.

Your projects will span a variety of construction methods, sizes, and applications. These could include anything from simple data displays to large multi axis motion control equipment. The kinds of projects you will work on may include:

• Driving the technical direction of factory automation in the manufacturing group
• Architecting factory automation solutions to improve speed, quality, reliability and efficiency in the manufacturing process
• Large scale multi axis custom CNC based systems
• Robotic based assembly and inspection equipment

About You:

• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field
• 18+ years of experience developing, activating, and troubleshooting CNC (Fanuc, Siemens), robotic (Fanuc, Kuka, Abb etc.), or automated systems (Beckhoff, etc.)
• Experience designing, project managing, and executing on robotic and automation systems in a rate production or factory setting
• Experience writing software for industry standard control systems (CNC, PLCs, motor drives)
• Demonstrated ability to design and implement industrial safety systems including risk assessments
• Demonstrated ability to identify and mitigate technical risks in complex systems

Nice to haves but not required:  

• Experience producing electrical and pneumatics documentation
• Experience writing control software for Siemens CNCs/PLCs