Staff Software Engineer, Flight Software

At Relativity Space, we have two audacious goals: to build the next great commercial launch company with Terran R and to become America's leading force in additive manufacturing innovation. Both contribute to our long-term vision of creating humanity’s industrial base on Mars, paving the way for interplanetary life to expand the possibilities of the human experience. This journey begins right here on Earth – where we design, build, and fly rockets to deliver customer payloads to orbit. Terran R, our medium-to-heavy lift reusable rocket, fulfills the growing demand for launch capacity, thanks to our iterative approach that accelerates design, testing, and development while minimizing costs. While our groundbreaking research and development in 3D printing pushes the boundaries of large-scale additive manufacturing.

Your journey with us is more than just a job – it’s an opportunity to shape the future of aerospace technology, additive manufacturing, and the human experience alongside a community of passionate, creative individuals. Join us on this extraordinary journey, as we work together to transform our vision into reality.

About the Team:

The Flight Software team is responsible for developing real-time and mission critical software to support the Terran R program including engine testing, stage testing, and static fire and launch operations . The team is responsible for the full life cycle of software, from working with GNC, Propulsion, Avionics teams to define functional and performance requirements, to developing the software, unit testing, developing CI/CDs, and then testing it against our various test platforms with physics sims . This team is responsible for the delivery of reliable and robust software that directly controls the Terran R rockets to reach orbit and perform Entry Descent and Landing.

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.).

At Relativity Space, we are committed to transparency and fairness in our compensation practices. Actual compensation will be determined based on experience, qualifications, and other job-related factors.

Compensation is only one part of our total rewards package. Relativity Space offers competitive salary and equity, a generous PTO and sick leave policy, parental leave, an annual learning and development stipend, and more! To see some of the benefits & perks we offer, please visit here.

Hiring Range:

$194,000 - $249,000 USD

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.