SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Relativity Space is developing the Terran R reusable launch vehicle to deliver payloads to orbit. The Integrated Performance team owns the holistic view of how Terran R comes together, ensuring every system achieves ambitious objectives across the full launch lifecycle—from trajectory design and aerodynamics to reliability analysis and post-flight review.
The Thermal team predicts temperatures and designs thermal architectures for structures, fluids, components, and avionics on reusable launch vehicles. The team applies thermodynamics and heat transfer expertise across all flight phases and ground operations, using first-principle calculations, reduced-order modeling, and detailed thermal simulations to drive vehicle designs and solve cross-disciplinary integration challenges.
As Senior Thermal Engineer, you will drive development of primary and secondary structures, fluids hardware, and avionics that survive extreme thermal environments. You will own the architecture, sizing, and development of thermal systems including insulation, heaters, thermal protection, and environmental conditioning in collaboration with peer technical teams. You will build, execute, and validate thermal analyses at component, subsystem, and vehicle levels, including relevant tool development and automation. You will direct and mentor design and development engineers in applying thermal sciences to achieve system and component requirements.
This role offers meaningful individual impact within a small, high-ownership team embedded across multiple technical domains. You'll engage hands-on with hardware and operations, with authority to drive programmatic change. The organization is large enough to support complex development yet small enough that individual contributors shape decisions and see work come to life rapidly.
