Radar Engineer, Mars Orbiter UHF Sounder

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. 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.

The Interplanetary Sciences Program was established to expand access to scientific exploration across our solar system. Its mission is to make planetary research faster, more affordable, and more capable than ever before by rethinking how science missions are designed, built, and operated. The program aims to enable scientists to send instruments to distant worlds without decades of development or prohibitive costs.

By creating a sustainable model for interplanetary exploration, 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.

You’ll be the technical lead and responsible engineer for a wide‑band UHF shallow radar sounder for a Mars orbiter mission, owning the instrument from design through spacecraft integration, calibration, and commissioning, with no hand‑off to another team mid‑stream.

The instrument operates in two modes: a sounder mode that measures subsurface layer reflections and a radiometer mode that measures the temperature of subsurface layers over a wide footprint.

This is a hybrid role: you will personally execute significant portions of the design and analysis while providing technical leadership, working closely with our science partners as their primary engineering counterpart. You will co‑design the instrument against science objectives and develop the flight hardware and processing implementations.

• Own the system design for the radar electronics, signal processing chain, and antenna system at the vehicle level for both sounder and radiometer modes, including instrument performance, power, and mass budgets, link budgets, and SNR/penetration‑depth analyses
• Lead waveform trade studies in collaboration with the science partners, implement the waveforms and baseline algorithms they develop, and co‑design with the science team to ensure the instrument meets science adequacy and mission science objectives
• Lead the hardware development, including prototype development and validation at the brass board level ahead of flight designs
• Define the instrument calibration scheme for both radar and radiometer modes
• Coordinate hardware development across RF, digital, power, and mechanical disciplines, along with firmware and software development
• Lead instrument qualification and acceptance testing, integration into the spacecraft, and terrestrial analog flight testing, including test integration and post‑flight data review
• Perform spectrum licensing and frequency coordination for instrument operation and testing and support instrument calibration and on‑orbit commissioning

• 7+ years of experience in electrical hardware development, such as software defined radios, radar transceivers, or sophisticated digital processors
• Demonstrated ability to develop and manage radar system performance budgets
• Experience with analysis and modeling of radar returns and radar performance
• Experience implementing radio or radar transceivers as software‑defined radios
• Field testing, flight testing, or spaceflight experience with radio or radar transceivers
• Deep expertise in one or more of the following:
  • Implementation of signal processing chains in FPGA and/or GPU processing
  • Design of mixed‑signal and digital PCBs, such as software‑defined radios or board‑level FPGA designs
  • RF circuit design, including power amplifiers, low‑noise amplifiers, and filters
  • Antenna design and verification

• Experience with microwave radiometry or radiometer instrument design
• Familiarity with planetary or terrestrial radars (e.g., SHARAD, MARSIS, RIMFAX, ice‑penetrating radar)
• Hands‑on experience with AMD/Xilinx RFSoC or Zynq…