Senior Software Engineer, Industrial Control

About the Team:

Relativity Space is on a mission to better connect humanity to space and the universe beyond our planet. With decades of experience scaling world-class technology organizations like Google, CEO Eric Schmidt is guiding Relativity into its next phase: advancing Terran R toward launch and building the foundation for long-term impact.

The Terrestrial Software team is building the foundation for an automated rocket factory and integrated launch platform. Their mission is to automate and streamline workflows across the entire lifecycle of Terran R, from raw material intake to launch operations and eventually manufacturing on Mars. Today, that means partnering directly with teams across design, materials, manufacturing, and test and launch to design, implement, and deploy end user enterprise-wide applications, industrial automation, data analytics infrastructure, and next-generation AI to solve real problems and accelerate progress. Long term, the team is laying the groundwork for a modular, scalable software platform that can power highly autonomous operations on Earth and beyond. This is a team for builders and thinkers who thrive on cross-functional impact and want to shape the digital backbone of our future in space.

About the Role:

Designs and maintains the controller processes that run on safety-critical hardware, focusing on fast, deterministic binaries, memory-based IPC, and integration with field and TCP-based protocols.

About You:

• You have 6+ years of experience building C++ or Rust software that runs on or near safety-critical hardware, with a strong focus on correctness and reliability
• You have deep understanding of memory management and inter-process communication (IPC), and you are comfortable designing and debugging high-performance binaries that pass data efficiently between processes
• You have hands-on experience with real-time or near-real-time execution, and you care about low jitter, latency, and throughput, using common tools to track down performance and memory bottlenecks
• You are comfortable integrating with industrial communication protocols (e.g., CAN, LXI, Modbus, RMC/DMCP, OpenDAQ or similar), including moving data reliably over TCP between controllers and higher-level systems

Nice to haves but not required:

• Experience designing and operating systems running on a real-time OS or environments with tight real-time constraints
• Experience with lock-free or low-contention concurrency patterns for high-throughput data exchange between processes
• Familiarity with time-sensitive networking, deterministic scheduling, or other techniques used to coordinate multiple controllers in a safety-critical environment
• Prior experience bringing up or debugging hardware-in-the-loop test setups for controllers, including working directly in lab environments with instruments and test equipment