Lead, Structural Analysis Engineering; Stress, Fatigue & Damage Tolerance

Lead, Structural Analysis Engineering (Stress, Fatigue & Damage Tolerance)

Long Beach, California

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. 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.

The Integrated Performance team owns the holistic view of how Terran R comes together, ensuring that every system on the vehicle and ground is capable of achieving ambitious performance, reliability, and reusability goals. The team works across the full launch system—from trajectory design and aerodynamics to reliability analysis and post‑flight data review—with technical leadership influence across the entire product lifecycle. Beyond analysis, team members engage hands‑on with hardware, testing, and operations, with the authority to lead and drive meaningful programmatic change.

The Integrated Analysis group accelerates Relativity’s hardware engineering through advanced analysis, life prediction, and modern tools. The team enables robust, lightweight, and reusable structures by leading the integration of fatigue, fracture, durability, and inspection considerations early in design and throughout vehicle maturation.

As a Structural Analysis Lead, you will provide technical leadership for the structural integrity, strength, durability, and life management of flight hardware across the vehicle. You will define and execute structural analysis strategies spanning static strength, fatigue and damage tolerance, fracture mechanics, and structural dynamics. In this role, you will guide the development, verification, and certification of primary and secondary structures from early design through flight operations.

You will work closely with design, materials, manufacturing, and test teams to ensure structurally robust designs that meet performance, reliability, and reusability requirements.

• Lead structural analysis activities for major vehicle structures across component, subsystem, and vehicle levels
• Define structural analysis methodologies, requirements, and design margins for flight‑critical hardware
• Provide technical leadership across static stress, fatigue, fracture mechanics, and durability assessments
• Stress & Structural Analysis
  • Perform and review static and dynamic stress analyses for metallic and additively manufactured structures
  • Develop and maintain finite element models using tools such as Nastran and Abaqus with pre/post environments such as Femap
  • Evaluate structural margins including yield, ultimate strength, buckling, thermal stress, and dynamic response
  • Support structural sizing and optimization of primary load‑bearing structures
  • Develop fatigue life and durability predictions using SN/EN methods and fracture mechanics approaches
  • Perform crack initiation and crack growth analyses using tools such as NASGRO and AFGROW
  • Establish fatigue allowables, crack growth limits, inspection intervals, and life limits for flight hardware
  • Translate time‑domain or spectral load environments into fatigue‑relevant stress histories and cumulative damage metrics
  • Translate flight, ground, acoustic, and thermal environments into structural loads and responses
  • Integrate loads and environments into structural analysis and fatigue life predictions
  • Support multidisciplinary analysis for vehicle‑level structural…