Senior Software Engineer

At Relativity Space, we have two audacious goals: to build the next great commercial launch company with Terran R and to become America's leading force in additive manufacturing innovation. Both contribute to our long-term vision of creating humanity’s industrial base on Mars, paving the way for interplanetary life to expand the possibilities of the human experience. This journey begins right here on Earth – where we design, build, and fly rockets to deliver customer payloads to orbit. Terran R, our medium-to-heavy lift reusable rocket, fulfills the growing demand for launch capacity, thanks to our iterative approach that accelerates design, testing, and development while minimizing costs. While our groundbreaking research and development in 3D printing pushes the boundaries of large-scale additive manufacturing.

Your journey with us is more than just a job – it’s an opportunity to shape the future of aerospace technology, additive manufacturing, and the human experience alongside a community of passionate, creative individuals. Join us on this extraordinary journey, as we work together to transform our vision into reality.

About the Team: 

The additive technology team leads research and development of Relativity’s Stargate 3D-printing platform and factory operating system to produce large-scale metal structures for the industrial base. The team works with robotics engineers, data scientists, systems engineers, and welders to advance Relativity’s innovative tech stack, which leverages autonomy, advanced simulation, machine learning, and robotics. Working at the intersection of hardware and software, the team is creating a unified platform that can perform additive manufacturing, in-situ monitoring, NDE, and subtraction capabilities in a single print cell. Progressing in parallel to Terran R development, Relativity’s breakthroughs in large-scale additive manufacturing have the potential to revolutionize the defense industrial base. 

The Robotics Team at Relativity Space is responsible for building and refining the hardware that powers our autonomous systems. From advanced perception and robotics for manufacturing and additive processes to specialized robots that support development and deployment, our R&D Software engineers work in close collaboration with hardware and automation to develop cutting-edge technologies that push the boundaries of space exploration and industrial manufacturing. As a key member of the team, you’ll bring your software expertise to revolutionize the way robotics cooperate and additively manufacture here on earth and off planet.

About the Role:

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll be responsible for shaping the core software that interfaces with our multi-robot manufacturing system. You won’t be maintaining legacy code—you’ll be defining patterns, building reusable libraries, and building out and transforming prototypes into production-grade systems that control and coordinate real-world robotics hardware. You’ll work across the stack, focusing on system orchestration, state machines, data handling, and integration with perception, motion, and thermal systems. Your work won’t be abstract—you’ll write the software that controls a system of robots merging perception, automation and additive manufacturing. Test writing and debugging are core to this role—not just checkboxes, but crafts. You know how to build fast feedback into your workflow and how to isolate, validate, and debug complex real-world behavior. This is not a front-end or dev tools role. It’s about building clean, modular systems in C++ and Python that serve as the foundation for all STARR software. 

About You:

• You write production-quality C, C++ and Python or Rust with a strong focus on modularity, clarity, and testability
• You’ve worked on robotics, embedded systems, perception pipelines, or similar real-world platforms
• You know how to design and implement robust state machines and system-level orchestration
• You see around corners—your experience helps you anticipate integration risks and failure modes early
• You treat debugging and test building as first-class engineering problems
• You collaborate well across disciplines and communicate clearly with hardware, ML, and controls teams
• You’re comfortable defining structure in early-stage systems and working independently toward high standards

Nice to haves but not required:  

• Familiarity with ROS2, or deep experience working with ROS nodes and message-passing systems
• Experience integrating real-time sensor data from vision, LiDAR, or thermal systems
• Background in perception pipelines, multi-robot coordination, or HIL environments 
• Proficiency with build systems like CMake and infrastructure tools like Docker
• Experience with data pipelines: saving structured logs, database integration, or time-series metrics
• Exposure to ML/AI environments, especially wrapping or porting prototype code into production systems
• Background in additive manufacturing, robotics platforms, or industrial automation

At Relativity Space, we are committed to transparency and fairness in our compensation practices. Actual compensation will be determined based on experience, qualifications, and other job-related factors.

Compensation is only one part of our total rewards package. Relativity Space offers competitive salary and equity, a generous PTO and sick leave policy, parental leave, an annual learning and development stipend, and more! To see some of the benefits & perks we offer, please visit here.

We 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.