Senior AI​/ML Scientist, Planetary Science

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.

Relativity Space is on a mission to better connect humanity to space and what’s beyond our planet with its launch vehicle, the Terran R. Its Interplanetary Sciences Program was established to expand access to scientific exploration across our Solar System, with the mission to push the boundaries of how planetary science is done, and make planetary research faster, more affordable, and more capable than ever before.

We are rethinking how science missions are designed, built, and operated, and how the collected data is analyzed and used. We are transforming space science from an occasional event into a continuous process of discovery that accelerates knowledge, broadens participation, and inspires the next generation of explorers.

We are seeking an AI/ML Scientist to develop and deploy machine learning systems that unlock new science from our 2028 Mars orbital mission. This is a rare opportunity to work at the intersection of frontier AI methods and planetary science – building new approaches for a data environment with disparate datasets and often sparse observations, heterogeneous instrument modalities, and a dynamic planetary system we are only beginning to understand.

The problems will be diverse and the solutions open-ended. You will be building AI models to run on the spacecraft in Mars orbit. This position is jointly advised by Relativity's Interplanetary Sciences Program and Polymathic AI, a research collaboration initiative pioneering foundation models for scientific data across physical disciplines.

One topic is enhancing Mars atmospheric modeling and doing weather forecasting. The historical record of Mars weather is fragmentary. You will develop and apply Machine Learning techniques to combine Earth-derived atmospheric datasets and known Martian atmospheric physics to create a weather forecasting model to be run on the spacecraft at Mars with real-time collected data as the input. This development includes optimizing the weather forecasting model to run on the spacecraft at Mars.

Another challenge is multi-modal data fusion. You will develop and build methods that reconstruct coherent 3D representations by integrating complementary datasets of 2D surface images, 3D surface models, geologic mapping of units, and radar depth soundings, each having different geometry, resolution, temporal cadence and past and new data.

These approaches will then be applied to autonomous in situ science. You will build systems that monitor observations, analyze them in real-time on the spacecraft and detect scientifically significant events based on known phenomenology of Mars as well as novelty detection. Critically, you will develop the AI decision-making layer that closes the loop, autonomously re-tasking the spacecraft to acquire follow-up observations from onboard inference on flight hardware.

This capability is central to the…