Staff Software Engineer, Flight Software

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 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.

About the Role:

Aerospace experience isn't required. We value driven engineers with strong computer science fundamental who collaborate well to solve meaningful problems.

As a Staff 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.

About You:

• An undergraduate or graduate degree in a relevant engineering discipline (Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering) and 7+ years of production development experience.
• Deep professional experience and technical expertise delivering production-level and real time embedded software.
• Expert in Rust, C++, and/or other system languages.
• Expert in algorithms and data structures.
• Expert in Operating System concepts such as memory management, CPU shielding, scheduling, etc.
• Experience with software development processes including: source control, bug tracking, and CI/CD.

Nice to haves but not required:

• Experience with developing fault and failure tolerant system and knowledge of voting and internal state synchronization.
• Experience with systems-level programming like synchronization primitives, memory management, etc.
• Experience with networking protocols (UDP vs TCP), OSI layers. switching and routing.
• Experience with developing software to a safety standard and achieving formal certification with a governing body (e.g. NASA, FAA, FDA, etc.).