Senior Software Engineer, Flight Software
Relativity Space, Long Beach, California
- Pay
- $165K–$211K / year
- Work type
- Not stated
- Level
- Senior
- Area
- Software engineering
- Posted
- Jul 2, 2025
About the role
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 beyond the 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. Now is a unique moment in time where it’s early enough to leave your mark on the product, the process, and the 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.
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 Senior Flight Software Engineer, you will have a major role in the full life cycle of Flight Software from gathering requirements, defining architecture, development, integration to the commissioning and support of test and launch operations. You'll work closely with GNC engineers to integrate complex algorithms for vehicle ascent and re-entry, descent and landing, and 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.
This role is expected to be on-site 3x a week in our Long Beach, CA headquarters.
- Write concise documentation such as Concept of Operations, Interface Control Documents, and Software Design Documents.
- Architect and deliver core flight software with a strong focus on meeting system and performance requirements such as latency, allowed jitter, and control frequency.
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