Manager, Software Engineering - Factory Platform

Relativity Space•Long Beach, CA

11d•$179,000 - $269,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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 Terrestrial Software team is building the foundation for an automated rocket factory and integrated launch platform. Their mission is to automate and streamline workflows across the entire lifecycle of Terran R, from raw material intake to launch operations and eventually manufacturing on Mars. Today, that means partnering directly with teams across design, materials, manufacturing, and test and launch to design, implement, and deploy end user enterprise-wide applications, industrial automation, data analytics infrastructure, and next-generation AI to solve real problems and accelerate progress. Long term, the team is laying the groundwork for a modular, scalable software platform that can power highly autonomous operations on Earth and beyond. This is a team for builders and thinkers who thrive on cross-functional impact and want to shape the digital backbone of our future in space. About the Role: As an Engineering Manager on the Factory Platform team, you'll lead a squad building mission-critical tooling for design and simulation engineers who are optimizing the performance of Terran R. Your team will deliver the engineering analysis platform, design tools, and data pipelines that transform test stand telemetry and simulation results into actionable insights. You'll work directly with propulsion, structures, avionics, and test engineers to understand their workflows, remove bottlenecks, and build software that accelerates their ability to iterate, validate, and improve the vehicle with rigor and speed.

Requirements

Bachelor's or higher in CS or a related engineering field
5+ years of software engineering experience across multiple production systems
Proven track record hiring, retaining, and developing engineers
Expert in React and modern frontend tooling
Fluent in at least one backend language (Go, Python) and willing to range across the stack
Comfortable driving architectural decisions and building buy-in across engineering and non-engineering stakeholders
Strong written and verbal communication - you can write a crisp design doc and also give useful, timely feedback to a struggling engineer

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's or higher in CS or related engineering field
3+ years engineering management experience with direct reports (5-10+ team size)
7+ years prior software engineering experience
Strong hiring, retention, and talent development track record
Full-stack technical foundation (frontend and backend)
Excellent communication: technical tradeoffs, strategy docs, feedback, influence
Experience managing managers or multiple teams
Background in engineering analysis tools, scientific computing, or data-intensive applications
Familiarity with simulation, CAD/CAE, or test data systems
Aerospace, automotive, or hardware-driven industry experience
DevOps, MLOps, or data platform engineering background

Responsibilities

Hire, grow, and manage a team of 5-10 engineers (1:1s, performance reviews, career development)
Set team roadmap and priorities in partnership with design and test engineering stakeholders
Establish engineering standards: code quality, testing, deployment, incident response
Guide architectural decisions and keep your team unblocked
Build a high-performing culture of ownership and continuous improvement
Ship code as much as possible, time permitting