Senior NDE Engineer, Additive Manufacturing

Relativity Space • Long Beach, CA

8d

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 Materials and NDE (Non-Destructive Evaluation) team plays a central role in enabling Terran R to fly, re-fly, and scale: developing, characterizing, and inspecting materials and processes across all parts of the vehicle. From welding and additive manufacturing to advanced composites, the team works at the intersection of innovation and execution, balancing performance and reliability with cost, quality, and schedule. As we move toward first flight and beyond, the challenges become more exciting, offering opportunities to shape how we design and develop for re-use. With ownership across products, systems, and disciplines, engineers gain broad exposure and drive key decisions across design, manufacturing, and operations.
About the Role:
Own production NDE methods applicable to additively manufactured (AM) spaceflight hardware
Own the NDE inspection development process from initial problem statement on hardware, to implementation, to iterative improvement with cross-functional teams
Perform NDE feasibility and probability of detection studies with floor personnel
Inform hardware changes to enable NDE accessibility
Inform and generate drawing requirements for NDE methods on AM hardware using empirically derived process understanding
Establish risk posture and baseline NDE approaches during early development of hardware
Incorporate interdisciplinary knowledge from the additive/ welding process, non-destructive inspection, machining and post-processing implications
Interface with:
PBF team to interpret process parameter impacts to material properties
Materials laboratory staff to understand material characterization
Non-destructive examination personnel to interpret detected discontinuities
Supply chain to specify vendor requirements, audit criteria, and process controls
Leadership to elevate risks and overcome roadblocks
This is not a desk job!

Requirements

• B.S. & 5+ Years of Experience
• M.S. & 3+ Years of Experience
• PhD. & 1+ Years of Experience
• Experience with additively manufactured metals and materials characterization of same
• Understanding of NDE principles and their application to both AM and non-AM processes
• Direct experience in a manufacturing environment (generating non-conformances, writing work instructions)
• Substantial experience performing design of experiments (DoE)
• Demonstrated ability to generate technical presentations
• Demonstrated experience performing data analysis on analogous data to NDE inspections (quality, yield, non-conformances) and ownership of decision-making following analysis

Nice To Haves

• Direct experience with AM hardware for aerospace/ propulsion systems
• Familiarity with industry NDE codes (AWS, ASNT, NASA)
• Ability to build computational/ statistical pipelines with regard to process/ inspection data
• Experience building custom statistical bases/ adapting acceptance criteria
• Experience adapting NDE approaches for AM hardware and generating detection thresholds
• Familiarity with fatigue and damage tolerance (FDT) properties and NDE inspection intervals tied to them
• Familiarity with key process variables for welding/ DED/ PBF
• An understanding of aluminums, Ni-based superalloys, stainless steels, and titaniums
• Demonstrated ability for technical writing (published papers, patents)

Responsibilities

• Own production NDE methods applicable to additively manufactured (AM) spaceflight hardware
• Own the NDE inspection development process from initial problem statement on hardware, to implementation, to iterative improvement with cross-functional teams
• Perform NDE feasibility and probability of detection studies with floor personnel
• Inform hardware changes to enable NDE accessibility
• Inform and generate drawing requirements for NDE methods on AM hardware using empirically derived process understanding
• Establish risk posture and baseline NDE approaches during early development of hardware
• Incorporate interdisciplinary knowledge from the additive/ welding process, non-destructive inspection, machining and post-processing implications

Benefits

• Relativity Space offers competitive salary and equity, a generous PTO and sick leave policy, parental leave, an annual learning and development stipend, and more!

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees