Senior Flight Software Engineer

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 launchcapacity. 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 Vehicle Software team develops the safety-critical software that runs on Terran R. The work spans a distributed, real-time control system operating under extreme conditions like Mach 5 atmospheric flight, with a deployment pace that allows you to see your code run on rocket engines daily. The team is building new system architecture from the ground up and just as importantly, testing, releasing, and deploying it.

You don’t need an aerospace background: what matters is experience with high-reliability software for complex systems. This is a rare opportunity to shape the foundation of Terran R’s software stack while directly influencing performance, reliability, and flight success.

Aerospace experience isn’t required. We value driven engineers with strong computer science fundamental who collaborate well to solve meaningful problems. As a Senior Flight Software Engineer, you will be a technical leader within the team with a high level of autonomy tackling core flight software products that directly impact the Terran R program and be responsible for setting standards and best practices for the team along with mentoring junior engineers.

Architect and deliver core flight software with a strong focus on meeting system and performance requirements such as latency, allowed jitter, and control frequency. Work closely with GNC engineers to integrate complex algorithms for vehicle ascent and re-entry, descent and landing. Work closely with Embedded Software Engineers and Avionics to integrate vehicle sensor data such as GPS, IMU, Radar, and to control vehicle equipment such as valves, thrust vector controls, and landing grid fins.

Develop telemetry system that prioritizes, filters, stores and forwards, and encodes/decodes telemetry to RF format, and routes that data through ground stations and to data centers. Support the development and integration of testing infrastructure such as HITL (Hardware-In-The-Loop) and HOOTL (Hardware-Out-Of-The-Loop) and physics and fluid sims. Focus on maximizing the team’s velocity by defining processes, best practices, integrating modern tools and technologies, and mentoring junior engineers.

• An undergraduate or graduate degree in a relevant engineering discipline (Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering) with 5+ years experience of production development experience
• Experience delivering production-level and high reliability software
• Ex…