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Salary: USD 231,000 - 347,000 / annual
Relativity Space is building rockets to serve today's needs and tomorrow's breakthroughs. The Terran R vehicle will deliver customer payloads to orbit, meeting growing demand for launch capacity. The company is developing a rocket, factory, and business from the ground up, with a culture emphasizing autonomy, ownership, and impact at every level.
The Avionics team is responsible for the full lifecycle of Terran R's nervous system—designing, building, testing, installing, and operating the hardware that connects and controls every major electrical system on the vehicle and ground. The team leverages close partnership between avionics design, manufacturing, and test to enable rapid iteration and feedback loops. Engineers are deeply embedded across other functions, working closely with propulsion, GNC, fluids, and stage engineering teams to ensure seamless integration and operation.
As a Principal Digital Hardware Engineer on the Avionics team, you will design, test, and analyze custom high-speed electronics on the Terran R launch vehicle. You will oversee hardware development through the entire product lifecycle from concept to flight maturity, including initial design, board bring-up, design verification, qualification, initial flight production, integration, and vehicle operations. You will work with cross-functional partner teams across the company to help make the best possible decisions for the overall vehicle. A strong candidate will have deep technical background in electronics design and sound project management skills to ensure the hardware project is both reliable and on-schedule to support Terran R's launch.
This is a unique opportunity to help shape Terran R's fundamental avionics architecture with high degree of ownership on components that will fly.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field
- 10+ years of experience in electronics designed for harsh environments and mission-critical applications such as launch vehicles, spacecraft, aircraft, or robotics
- Technical expertise in high-speed digital design including implementation of high-speed serial interfaces (SERDES, PCIe, Ethernet, etc.); memory interfaces; design for SoCs, microcontrollers, microprocessors, and FPGAs
- Expertise in signal integrity for high-speed digital links, including controlled-impedance stackup design, transmission line and via modeling, loss and crosstalk management, reflection and discontinuity mitigation, channel analysis, and equalization (CTLE, DFE, FFE) tradeoffs
- Expertise in power integrity, including power distribution network (PDN) design to target impedance, decoupling strategy, DC IR drop and current density analysis, AC/frequency-domain PDN impedance analysis, plane resonance mitigation, and power delivery for high-current, low-voltage SoCs and FPGAs
- Experience with eCAD software such as Altium or equivalent
- Experience driving rigorous engineering processes (requirements capture, design reviews, design verification, etc.)
- Experience working with highly cross-functional teams (mechanical, thermal, electrical, software, etc.) to develop integrated electronics solutions
- Experience mentoring engineers in engineering best-practices and domain-specific technical principles
- Comfortable communicating deeply technical topics to a wide variety of audiences
NICE TO HAVES:
- Familiarity with embedded software development and integration for real-time control systems
- Experience with design for reliability and manufacturability of avionics hardware including DFMEA, accelerated life testing, and qualification testing
- Proven experience verifying high-speed digital links through simulation and test, including pre- and post-layout SI/PI simulation (e.g., Keysight ADS, Ansys SIwave/HFSS, Cadence Sigrity, Siemens HyperLynx), IBIS/IBIS-AMI channel simulation, S-parameter extraction and analysis, and lab characterization using vector network analyzers (VNAs), TDR/TDT, high-bandwidth real-time and sampling oscilloscopes, BERTs, and eye diagram, jitter, and compliance measurements
- Ability to correlate simulation models with measured hardware data and use the results to refine design rules and close margin on future designs
- Hands-on experience with environmental testing (vibration, shock, thermal cycling, EMC) and test fixture design
- Familiarity with one or more Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) including VHDL, Verilog, or SystemVerilog
- Familiarity with FPGA toolchains and SoC platforms across industry leaders like AMD Xilinx, Intel, Microchip, etc.
- Knowledge of safety-critical design practices and standards (e.g., DO-254, MIL-STD-1553, IPC-A-610)
