Senior Embedded Software Engineer

Senior Embedded Software Engineer

At Relativity Space, we're building rockets to serve today's needs and tomorrow's breakthroughs. Our Terran R vehicle will deliver customer payloads to orbit, meeting the growing demand for launch capacity. But that's just the start. Achieving commercial success with Terran R will unlock new opportunities to advance science, exploration, and innovation, pioneering progress that reaches beyond the known.

Joining Relativity means becoming part of something where autonomy, ownership, and impact exist at every level. Here, you're not just executing tasks; you're solving problems that haven't been solved before, helping develop a rocket, a factory, and a business from the ground up. Whether you're in propulsion, manufacturing, software, avionics, or a corporate function, you'll collaborate across teams, shape decisions, and see your work come to life in record time. Relativity is a place where creativity and technical rigor go hand in hand, and your voice will help define the stories we're writing together. Now is a unique moment in time where it's early enough to leave your mark on the product, the process, and the culture, but far enough along that Terran R is tangible and picking up momentum. The most meaningful work of your career is waiting. Join us.

About the Team

The Vehicle Software team develops the safety-critical software that runs on Terran R. The work spans a distributed, real-time control system operating under extreme conditions like Mach 5 atmospheric flight, with a deployment pace that allows you to see your code run on rocket engines daily. The team is building new system architecture from the ground up and just as importantly, testing, releasing, and deploying it. You don't need an aerospace background: what matters is experience with high-reliability software for complex systems. This is a rare opportunity to shape the foundation of Terran R's software stack while directly influencing performance, reliability, and flight success.

About the Role

Our Embedded Software team develops the flight critical firmware running across the avionics systems of the Terran R rocket. The software we build runs inside the vehicle's avionics boxes and interfaces directly with sensors, actuators, communication systems, and control hardware that support vehicle operations during testing and flight.

In this role, you will develop low level embedded software for real time systems, working close to the hardware to build reliable, high performance firmware that operates in demanding environments. This position is ideal for engineers who enjoy working across the stack from hardware interfaces and device drivers to real-time application logic.

What You'll Do

• Develop embedded firmware in C/C++ for microcontroller based systems
• Develop firmware that interfaces directly with hardware peripherals, sensors, and power electronics systems
• Develop low-level firmware and peripheral drivers for interfaces such as GPIO, SPI, DMA, ADC, and timers on ARM Cortex microcontrollers
• Collaborate closely with hardware and test engineers during hardware bring-up, validation, and system integration

About You

• 5+ years of experience developing software for embedded systems
• Strong programming skills in C/C++
• Experience working with RTOS based embedded systems
• Experience implementing drivers and interfaces for hardware peripherals (ADC, DAC, SPI, I2C, UART, etc.)
• Experience with DMA based peripheral data transfers and high speed data acquisition
• Strong debugging skills across hardware and software boundaries

Nice to Haves But Not Required

• Experience with motor control systems (BLDC, PMSM, FOC)
• Prior work experience in safety critical or aerospace systems
• Experience with low latency, highly deterministic real time systems
• Experience with network stack implementation, socket-level programming, and transport protocols such as UDP, TCP/IP, and multicast data distribution
• Familiarity with hardware in the loop testing (HITL) and CI/CD pipelines for embedded systems
• Experience with Python for test scripting and data analysis

Hiring Range: $154,000 - $211,000 USD

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. If you need a reasonable accommodation, please contact us at accommodations@relativityspace.com.