Software Engineer, Flight Software

Overview

Relativity Space is 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. Joining Relativity means autonomy, ownership, and impact at every level, collaborating across teams to shape decisions and see impact quickly. This is a unique moment to leave a mark on the product, the process, and the culture as Terran R gains momentum.

Relativity Space is on a mission to better connect humanity to space. The Vehicle Software team develops safety‑critical software for Terran R, spanning a distributed, real‑time control system under extreme conditions. The team is building new system architecture from the ground up, testing, releasing, and deploying it. You don’t need an aerospace background; experience with high‑reliability software for complex systems matters.

Aerospace experience isn’t required. We value driven engineers with strong computer science fundamentals who collaborate to solve meaningful problems.

Staff Flight Software Engineer will be a technical leader with a high level of autonomy, tackling core flight software products that directly impact the Terran R program. You will set standards and best practices for the team and mentor junior engineers.

• Architect and deliver core flight software with a focus on meeting system and performance requirements (latency, jitter, control frequency).
• Collaborate with GNC engineers to integrate algorithms for ascent, re‑entry, descent and landing.
• Work with Embedded Software Engineers and Avionics to integrate vehicle sensor data (GPS, IMU, Radar) and to control equipment (valves, thrust vector controls, landing grid fins).
• Develop telemetry systems that prioritize, filter, store, forward, and encode/decode telemetry to RF format, routing data through ground stations and data centers.
• Support testing infrastructure development and integration (HITL, HOOTL) and physics/fluid simulations.
• Maximize the team’s velocity by defining processes, best practices, using modern tools, and mentoring junior engineers.

• An undergraduate or graduate degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or Aerospace Engineering and 7+ years of production development experience.
• Deep experience delivering production‑level real‑time embedded software.
• Expert in Rust, C++, or other system languages.
• Expert in algorithms and data structures.
• Expert in operating system concepts (memory management, CPU shielding, scheduling, etc.).
• Experience with software development processes including source control, bug tracking, and CI/CD.

• Experience with fault and failure‑tolerant systems and knowledge of voting and internal state synchronization.
• Experience with systems‑level programming (synchronization primitives, memory management, etc.).
• Experience with networking protocols (UDP/TCP), OSI layers, switching and routing.
• Experience with safety standards and formal certification with governing bodies (e.g., NASA, FAA, FDA).

We are committed to transparency and fairness in compensation. Actual compensation will be based on experience, qualifications, and other job factors. Compensation is one part of total rewards including salary, equity, PTO/sick leave, parental leave, an annual learning and development stipend, and more. For details, please see the benefits information.

Hiring Range: $181,000 - $248,000 USD

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

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