Senior Guidance, Navigation & Controls Engineer

Company Overview:  

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:  

Relativity’s Integrated Performance teams ensure that our products work across all systems and disciplines, from trajectory design to aerodynamics to reliability analysis and beyond. Our groups size the Terran R rocket, design its missions for customer success, reliability, and reusability, and ensure that every system on the rocket and ground is engineered correctly for the demanding environments of launch and entry. Recently, we completed the preliminary design and analysis of Terran R including Relativity’s first-ever work on launch vehicle reusability, spanning advanced trajectory simulations, wind tunnel testing, and structures analysis, among many other projects.

About the Role:

You will work closely with a multidisciplinary vehicle engineering team to develop control and guidance solutions, assess the impact of designs on vehicle controllability and performance, work with the flight software team to implement control algorithms and navigation solutions into Terran R, and make recommendations for changing vehicle configuration to meet controllability and performance goals. Additionally, you will support ground and flight tests for Terran R launch vehicles.

About You:

In order to be successful in this role, you should be someone who thrives in ambiguity and is able to lead their own projects into completion. Ideally, you are someone who has come from a fast-paced, aerospace environment, having completed difficult projects while collaborating effectively with other key groups.

• An undergraduate or graduate degree (BS/MS/PhD) in engineering
• 5+ years of experience working on GNC solutions in aerospace
• Specialization in flight controls, navigation, or guidance for launch vehicles or satellites
• Experience with C++ and Python

Nice to haves but not required:  

• A graduate degree (MS/PhD) in engineering
• Experience developing flight code
• Ability to work in a fast-paced and intense start-up environment
• Ability to complete projects with ownership of end-to-end solutions with a high degree of independence.
• Prior work in a startup or agile development environment
• Experience in control systems, orbital mechanics, classical dynamics, aerodynamics, sensors and actuators, and modeling and simulation
• Experience working with onboard IMU/GPS and developing Navigation solution

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.