Principal Digital Hardware Engineer
Relativity Space · Long Beach, United States · 7h ago
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 Avionics team is responsible for the full lifecycle of Terran R’s nervous system, designing, building, testing, installing, and operating the hardware that connects and controls every major electrical system on the vehicle and ground. The team leverages close partnership between avionics design, manufacturing, and test to enable rapid iteration and feedback loops. Engineers are deeply embedded into other functions within Relativity, working closely with propulsion, GNC, fluids, and stage engineering teams to ensure seamless integration and operation. Now is a unique time to join: you’ll get to help shape Terran R's fundamental avionics architecture and be given a high degree of ownership on components that will fly.
About the Role:
As a Principal Digital Hardware Engineer on the Avionics team, you will design, test, and analyze custom high-speed electronics on the Terran R launch vehicle. You will oversee hardware development through the entire product lifecycle from concept to flight maturity to include initial design, board bring-up, design verification, qualification, initial flight production, integration, and vehicle operations. You will work with cross-functional partner teams across the company to help the team make the best possible decisions for the overall vehicle. A strong candidate for the role will have a deep technical background in electronics design and sound project management skills to ensure the hardware project is both reliable and on-schedule to support Terran R's launch!
About You:
- Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field
- 10+ years of experience in electronics designed for harsh environments and mission-critical applications such as launch vehicles, spacecraft, aircraft, or robotics
- Technical expertise in high-speed digital design including implementation of high-speed serial interfaces (SERDES, PCIe, Ethernet, etc.); memory interfaces; design for SoCs, microcontrollers, microprocessors, and FPGAs
- Expertise in signal integrity for high-speed digital links, including controlled-impedance stackup design, transmission line and via modeling, loss and crosstalk management, reflection and discontinuity mitigation, channel analysis, and equalization (CTLE, DFE, FFE) tradeoffs
- Expertise in power integrity, including power distribution network (PDN) design to target impedance, decoupling strategy, DC IR drop and current density analysis, AC/frequency-domain PDN impedance analysis, plane resonance mitigation, and power delivery for high-current, low-voltage SoCs and FPGAs
- Experience with eCAD software such as Altium or equivalent
- Experience driving rigorous engineering processes (requirements capture, design reviews, design verification, etc.)
- Experience working with highly cross-functional teams (mechanical, thermal, electrical, software, etc.) to develop integrated electronics solutions
- Experience mentoring engineers in engineering best-practices and domain-specific technical principles
- Comfortable communicating deeply technical topics to a wide variety of audiences
Nice to haves but not required:
- Familiarity with embedded software development and integration for real-time control systems
- Experience with design for reliability and manufacturability of avionics hardware including DFMEA, accelerated life testing, and qualification testing
- Proven experience verifying high-speed digital links through simulation and test, including pre- and post-layout SI/PI simulation (e.g., Keysight ADS, Ansys SIwave/HFSS, Cadence Sigrity, Siemens HyperLynx), IBIS/IBIS-AMI channel simulation, S-parameter extraction and analysis, and lab characterization using vector network analyzers (VNAs), TDR/TDT, high-bandwidth real-time and sampling oscilloscopes, BERTs, and eye diagram, jitter, and compliance measurements
- Ability to correlate simulation models with measured hardware data and use the results to refine design rules and close margin on future designs
- Hands-on experience with environmental testing (vibration, shock, thermal cycling, EMC) and test fixture design
- Familiarity with one or more Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) including VHDL, Verilog, or SystemVerilog
- Familiarity with FPGA toolchains and SoC platforms across industry leaders like AMD Xilinx, Intel, Microchip, etc.
- Knowledge of safety-critical design practices and standards (e.g., DO-254, MIL-STD-1553, IPC-A-610)
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.
If you need a reasonable accommodation, please contact us at accommodations@relativityspace.com.
Please note: Relativity Space does not accept unsolicited resumes, candidate profiles, or referrals from recruitment agencies or search firms. Any unsolicited submission - via email, our website, social media, or directly to an employee - will be deemed the property of Relativity Space, and no fee will be owed absent a current, fully executed agreement with Talent Acquisition that specifically authorizes submissions for the applicable role.