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Salary: USD 175,000 - 263,000 / 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, and the company is establishing an Interplanetary Sciences Program to expand access to scientific exploration across the solar system, making planetary research faster, more affordable, and more capable.
You will be the technical lead and responsible engineer for a wideband UHF shallow radar sounder for a Mars orbiter mission. You own the instrument from design through spacecraft integration, calibration, and commissioning with no hand-off mid-stream. The instrument operates in two modes: a sounder mode that measures subsurface layer reflections and a radiometer mode that measures the temperature of subsurface layers over a wide footprint.
This is a hybrid role combining significant hands-on design and analysis with technical leadership. You will work closely with science partners as their primary engineering counterpart, co-designing the instrument against science objectives and developing flight hardware and processing implementations.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own system design for radar electronics, signal processing chain, and antenna system at the vehicle level for both sounder and radiometer modes, including performance, power, and mass budgets, link budgets, and SNR/penetration-depth analyses
- Lead waveform trade studies in collaboration with science partners, implement waveforms and baseline algorithms, and co-design to ensure science adequacy and mission objectives
- Lead hardware development, including prototype development and validation at the brass board level ahead of flight designs
- Define the instrument calibration scheme for both radar and radiometer modes
- Coordinate hardware development across RF, digital, power, and mechanical disciplines, along with firmware and software development
- Lead instrument qualification and acceptance testing, integration into the spacecraft, and terrestrial analog flight testing, including test integration and post-flight data review
- Perform spectrum licensing and frequency coordination for instrument operation and testing, and support instrument calibration and on-orbit commissioning
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7+ years of experience in electrical hardware development, such as software defined radios, radar transceivers, or sophisticated digital processors
- Demonstrated ability to develop and manage radar system performance budgets
- Experience with analysis and modeling of radar returns and radar performance
- Experience implementing radio or radar transceivers as software-defined radios
- Field testing, flight testing, or spaceflight experience with radio or radar transceivers
- Deep expertise in one or more of the following: (1) Implementation of signal processing chains in FPGA and/or GPU processing, (2) Design of mixed-signal and digital PCBs such as software-defined radios or board-level FPGA designs, (3) RF circuit design including power amplifiers, low-noise amplifiers, and filters, (4) Antenna design and verification
NICE TO HAVES:
- Experience with microwave radiometry or radiometer instrument design
- Familiarity with planetary or terrestrial radars (e.g., SHARAD, MARSIS, RIMFAX, ice-penetrating radar)
- Hands-on experience with AMD/Xilinx RFSoC or Zynq UltraScale+ platforms
- Experience with spectrum licensing and frequency coordination for experimental or space systems
- Experience with polarimetric radar and full-polarimetry calibration
- Experience taking RF payloads through PDR/CDR, qualification, and spacecraft integration
