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Salary: USD 148,000 - 222,000 / 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. You will join the Avionics team, which is responsible for the full lifecycle of Terran R's electrical systems—designing, building, testing, installing, and operating the hardware that connects and controls every major electrical system on the vehicle and ground.
In this role, you will develop the vehicle's high-voltage battery system and grow into technical ownership of it as a complete product, covering cell, mechanical, thermal, electrical/BMS, and vehicle integration. Early on, you will work closely with experienced battery engineers to learn the current design, its history, and how it flies. Over time, you will take on more of the system's technical direction. You will be the link between the battery's mechanical and electrical disciplines and the rest of the vehicle.
Key responsibilities include:
**Architecture & Requirements:** Partner with the vehicle and power-system architecture team to define battery requirements from the top down—deriving energy, power, voltage, thermal, mass/volume, and life requirements from mission profile, ConOps, and power-system needs. Own and maintain the battery specification as the single source of truth for battery requirements, interfaces, and verification criteria with full traceability. Drive battery architecture and cell down-selection through documented trade studies. Define and manage interface control (electrical, mechanical, thermal, data) between the battery and the vehicle.
**Cross-Functional Definition:** Work with Flight Sciences, ConOps, and the Criteria team to define the battery's environmental and loads requirements—launch and flight vibration/shock, thermal environments, thermal cycling, EMI/EMC, altitude/vacuum, and mission duty cycles. Partner with the avionics/EE team to define BMS requirements and scope—cell monitoring, balancing, protection (OVP/UVP/OCP), contactor/heater control, state estimation, and fault management. Coordinate with the mechanical and vehicle-integration teams on packaging, mounting, thermal management, and installation interfaces. Work with the criteria and structures teams to close structural, thermal, and safety margins.
**Safety & Verification:** Own battery safety architecture—thermal-runaway detection and propagation mitigation, venting/burst-disc strategy, physical cell protection, and hazard analysis. Define the verification and qualification strategy—qualification and acceptance test programs at cell and pack level, test-as-you-fly philosophy, and the data systems that turn test results into rapid design feedback. Lead FMEA/FTA, reliability analysis, and identification/mitigation of single points of failure.
**Program & Technical Leadership:** Carry technical program-management responsibility for the battery effort—schedule, risk, dependencies, and status—and serve as the organized, single point of communication for battery status across teams. Represent the battery at vehicle design reviews (PDR/CDR-class), safety review boards, and cross-functional forums. Support supplier and cell-vendor engagement, including benchmarking, RFI/RFQ evaluation, and technical down-selection. Contribute to producibility/DFM and NPI as the design matures, and lead structured root-cause and corrective-action (RCCA) for anomalies.
This is a hands-on technical role with real cross-functional influence. As the battery team grows, it offers a clear path to technical leadership, including leading other engineers.
**Requirements:**
- Bachelor's degree in engineering (mechanical, electrical, aerospace, chemical, or related)
- 5+ years of battery systems development experience across the product lifecycle (concept → design → qualification), including HV lithium-ion packs
- Demonstrated ability to derive and own requirements top-down, with rigorous trade studies and traceable specifications—not just execute a fixed design
- Working depth across the battery stack: cell selection/characterization, pack architecture, thermal management, BMS scope, and safety/abuse behavior
- Strong understanding of battery safety, failure modes, and HV system fundamentals
- Proven cross-functional leadership and clear technical communication in fast-paced development environments
**Nice to haves:**
- Experience in aerospace, launch vehicle, automotive HV, or another high-consequence, environment-driven domain
- Familiarity with environmental qualification (vibration, shock, thermal-vacuum, EMI/EMC) and test-as-you-fly verification
- Functional safety / hazard analysis background (e.g., FMEA, FTA, ISO 26262 or aerospace equivalents)
- Experience with requirements and modeling tools (DOORS, Jama, Cameo/MBSE)
- Hands-on cell characterization and abuse/destructive test experience
- Familiarity with charging/ground support equipment and ground operations
