Lead Radar Instrument Engineer Long , 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 beyondthe 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. Nowis a unique moment in time where it’s early enough to leave your mark on the product, the process, andthe 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.

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 wideband UHF shallow radar sounder for a Mars orbiter mission, owning the instrument from design through spacecraft integration, calibration, and commissioning.

The instrumentoperatesin 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 withour science partners as their primary engineering counterpart. You will co‑design the instrument against scienceobjectivesanddevelop theflight 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…