Senior Design Criteria 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.

As a Design Criteria Engineer, you will be responsible for evaluating and guiding engineering designs from concept through qualification and to flight. In short, you’ll be the glue between our analysis, test, certification, and design teams, helping to connect the technical dots and solve problems across our vehicle programs.

About the Role: 

• Partner with groups across the company such as Flight Sciences, Structures, Fluids, Propulsion, Avionics, Launch, and Test to help foster Design Criteria methodologies minimizing overdesign
• Collaborate with responsible engineers throughout the entire design process, ensuring design criteria are properly considered and applied in the development of hardware
• Own and lead Design Criteria Reviews with various design teams and responsible engineers
• Provide guidance and approval of qualification and acceptance test campaigns in preparation for engine and stage testing and flight
• Develop methodologies to combine loads while considering various environmental inputs
• Derive flight hardware specific inputs from flight sciences and vehicle operations to enable robust hardware designs on an efficient timeline
• Build, modify, or eliminate engineering tools, process, and standards to support an efficient, product-focused culture for Terran R

About You:  

• An undergraduate degree in engineering or related field, and 7+ years relevant experience
• Experience performing cross-functional engineering and integration for systems subject to complex requirements
• Experience in mechanical engineering design and analysis

Nice to haves but not required: 

• A graduate degree (MS/PhD) in engineering or related field, and 10+ years relevant experience
• Hands-on experience in the design, integration, test, and operation of space vehicles or large complex systems
• History of taking an aerospace product from concept to production
• Experience administrating Atlassian platforms like Confluence and Jira
• Experience with tools/methods development and data analysis in Python or similar

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.