Senior FPGA Engineer, Digital Signal Processing

Relativity Space•Long Beach, CA

2d•$148,000 - $222,000

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 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 an FPGA engineer on the digital electronics team, you will analyze, design, and test custom FPGA firmware on the Terran R launch vehicle. You will oversee development for FPGAs across multiple products 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!

Requirements

Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field
5+ years of experience in FPGA development with a meaningful portion in DSP/SDR applications for mission-critical systems such as launch vehicles, spacecraft, aircraft, or robotics
Strong grounding in digital communications theory: modulation schemes, matched filtering, synchronization (timing/carrier recovery), equalization, and forward error correction
Proficiency in DSP fundamentals: multirate signal processing, filter design, FFT-based processing, and fixed-point quantization analysis
Technical expertise in FPGA development across the full lifecycle — RTL design, verification, synthesis, timing analysis, and bring-up/validation — with algorithms implemented in VHDL, Verilog, or SystemVerilog
Experience with one or more code generation or High Level Synthesis (HLS) languages including SpinalHDL, Chisel, Vitis, SystemC, or Simulink
Experience with high-speed data converter interfaces (JESD204B/C or similar) feeding DSP pipelines
Experience with hardware bring-up, validation, debugging, and data analysis
Familiarity with a wide variety of FPGA toolchains and SoC platforms across industry leaders like AMD Xilinx, Intel, Microchip, etc.

Nice To Haves

Experience with SDR frameworks or platforms (USRP, RFSoC, GNU Radio) or custom SDR hardware
Familiarity with algorithm modeling tools (MATLAB, Simulink, or Python/NumPy) for pre-RTL algorithm development
Familiarity with RISC-V development toolchain (e.g. linker scripts, compilers)
Familiarity with rigorous software development processes including version and configuration control, change traceability, code coverage analysis, CI/CD build pipelines, etc.

Responsibilities

Analyze, design, and test custom FPGA firmware on the Terran R launch vehicle.
Oversee development for FPGAs across multiple products 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.
Work with cross-functional partner teams across the company to help the team make the best possible decisions for the overall vehicle.