{"schemaVersion":"jobsearcher.job.v1","id":"5b13f914915fb2b90fd503fa","url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/5b13f914915fb2b90fd503fa","canonicalUrl":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/5b13f914915fb2b90fd503fa","title":"Senior Software Engineer, Flight Software","description":"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.\nJoining 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.\nAbout the Team:\nRelativity 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.\nThe 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.\nAbout the Role:\nAerospace experience isn't required. We value driven engineers with strong computer science fundamental who collaborate well to solve meaningful problems.\nAs 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.\nWrite concise documentation such as Concept of Operations, Interface Control Documents, and Software Design Documents.\nArchitect and deliver core flight software with a strong focus on meeting system and performance requirements such as latency, allowed jitter, and control frequency.\nDevelop 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.\nSupport 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.\nBuild automated unit, integration and system level tests in CI/CD.\nFocus on maximizing the team's velocity by defining processes, best practices, integrating modern tools and technologies, and mentoring junior engineers.\nAbout You:\nAn 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.\nDeep professional experience and technical expertise delivering production-level and real time embedded software.\nExpert in Rust, C++, and/or other system languages, as well as algorithms and data structures.\nExpert in Linux Operating System concepts such as memory management, CPU shielding, scheduling, etc.\nExpert in networking concepts such as TCP/IP, UDP.\nExperience with software development processes including: source control, bug tracking, and CI/CD.\nNice to haves, but Not Required:\nExperience with developing software to a safety standard and achieving formal certification with a governing body (e.g. NASA, FAA, FDA, etc.).\nFamiliarity with performing Hazard Analysis, FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) and Root Cause Analysis, and familiarity with FDIR (Fault Detection Isolation, Recovery) concepts.\nExperience with developing fault and failure tolerant system and knowledge of voting and internal state synchronization.\nExperience with systems-level programming like synchronization primitives, memory management, etc.\nExperience with different inter-process communication methods.\nExperience with message passing protocol such as flatbuffer or protobuf.\nWe 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.\nIf you need a reasonable accommodation, please contact us at accommodations@relativityspace.com.","company":"Relativity Space","rawCompany":"relativity space","city":"Long Beach","state":"CA","isRemote":false,"isActive":false,"createdAt":"2026-04-14T10:44:00.223Z","occupations":[{"code":"15-1252.00","title":"Software Developers","slug":"software-developers"},{"code":"17-2011.00","title":"Aerospace Engineers","slug":"aerospace-engineers"},{"code":"15-1299.08","title":"Computer Systems Engineers/Architects","slug":"computer-systems-engineers-architects"}],"industries":[{"code":"336414","title":"Guided Missile and Space Vehicle Manufacturing","slug":"guided-missile-and-space-vehicle-manufacturing"},{"code":"513210","title":"Software Publishers","slug":"software-publishers"},{"code":"541511","title":"Custom Computer Programming Services","slug":"custom-computer-programming-services"}],"jobPosting":{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"JobPosting","title":"Senior Software Engineer, Flight Software","description":"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.\nJoining 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.\nAbout the Team:\nRelativity 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.\nThe 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.\nAbout the Role:\nAerospace experience isn't required. We value driven engineers with strong computer science fundamental who collaborate well to solve meaningful problems.\nAs 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.\nWrite concise documentation such as Concept of Operations, Interface Control Documents, and Software Design Documents.\nArchitect and deliver core flight software with a strong focus on meeting system and performance requirements such as latency, allowed jitter, and control frequency.\nDevelop 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.\nSupport 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.\nBuild automated unit, integration and system level tests in CI/CD.\nFocus on maximizing the team's velocity by defining processes, best practices, integrating modern tools and technologies, and mentoring junior engineers.\nAbout You:\nAn 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.\nDeep professional experience and technical expertise delivering production-level and real time embedded software.\nExpert in Rust, C++, and/or other system languages, as well as algorithms and data structures.\nExpert in Linux Operating System concepts such as memory management, CPU shielding, scheduling, etc.\nExpert in networking concepts such as TCP/IP, UDP.\nExperience with software development processes including: source control, bug tracking, and CI/CD.\nNice to haves, but Not Required:\nExperience with developing software to a safety standard and achieving formal certification with a governing body (e.g. NASA, FAA, FDA, etc.).\nFamiliarity with performing Hazard Analysis, FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) and Root Cause Analysis, and familiarity with FDIR (Fault Detection Isolation, Recovery) concepts.\nExperience with developing fault and failure tolerant system and knowledge of voting and internal state synchronization.\nExperience with systems-level programming like synchronization primitives, memory management, etc.\nExperience with different inter-process communication methods.\nExperience with message passing protocol such as flatbuffer or protobuf.\nWe 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.\nIf you need a reasonable accommodation, please contact us at accommodations@relativityspace.com.","datePosted":"2026-04-14T10:44:00.223Z","dateModified":"2026-04-14T10:44:00.223Z","hiringOrganization":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Relativity Space","sameAs":"https://jobsearcher.com"},"jobLocation":{"@type":"Place","address":{"@type":"PostalAddress","addressLocality":"Long Beach","addressRegion":"CA","addressCountry":"US"}},"identifier":{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"JobSearcher","value":"5b13f914915fb2b90fd503fa"},"url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/5b13f914915fb2b90fd503fa"}}