Principal Digital Hardware Engineer

Relativity Space•Long Beach, CA

About The Position

As a Principal Digital Hardware Engineer on the Avionics team, you will design, test, and analyze custom high-speed electronics for the Terran R launch vehicle. You will oversee hardware development throughout the product lifecycle, from concept to flight maturity, including initial design, board bring-up, design verification, qualification, initial flight production, integration, and vehicle operations. You will partner with cross-functional teams across the company to help make the best decisions for the vehicle. The role calls for deep electronics design expertise and sound project management skills to ensure hardware is reliable and delivered on schedule to support Terran R's launch.

Requirements

Bachelor's 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 high-speed serial interfaces such as SERDES, PCIe, and Ethernet; memory interfaces; and 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 tradeoffs.
Expertise in power integrity, including power distribution network 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, including requirements capture, design reviews, and design verification.
Experience working with cross-functional teams, including mechanical, thermal, electrical, and software disciplines, to develop integrated electronics solutions.
Experience mentoring engineers in engineering best practices and domain-specific technical principles.
Comfort communicating deeply technical topics to a wide variety of audiences.

Nice To Haves

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.
Experience verifying high-speed digital links through simulation and test, including pre- and post-layout SI/PI simulation, IBIS/IBIS-AMI channel simulation, S-parameter extraction and analysis, and lab characterization using 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, including vibration, shock, thermal cycling, and EMC, and test fixture design.
Familiarity with one or more HDLs, including VHDL, Verilog, or SystemVerilog.
Familiarity with FPGA toolchains and SoC platforms from industry leaders such as AMD Xilinx, Intel, and Microchip.
Knowledge of safety-critical design practices and standards such as DO-254, MIL-STD-1553, and IPC-A-610.

Responsibilities

Design, test, and analyze custom high-speed electronics for the Terran R launch vehicle.
Oversee hardware development through the product lifecycle, including initial design, board bring-up, design verification, qualification, initial flight production, integration, and vehicle operations.
Work with cross-functional partner teams to support decisions for the overall vehicle.
Mentor engineers in engineering best practices and domain-specific technical principles.
Communicate deeply technical topics to a wide variety of audiences.