Senior Software Engineer, Vehicle Software Infrastructure Backend

Relativity Space•Long Beach, CA

1d•$165,000 - $211,000

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 Vehicle Software team develops the safety-critical software that runs on Terran R. The work spans a distributed, real-time control system operating under extreme conditions like Mach 5 atmospheric flight, with a deployment pace that allows you to see your code run on rocket engines daily. The team is building new system architecture from the ground up and just as importantly, testing, releasing, and deploying it. You don’t need an aerospace background: what matters is experience with high-reliability software for complex systems. This is a rare opportunity to shape the foundation of Terran R’s software stack while directly influencing performance, reliability, and flight success. About the Role: Design, develop, and maintain mission-critical, Linux-based and cloud-based infrastructure supporting automated software configuration management (management of software configuration parameters) Optimize system performance and reliability, with a focus on fast, robust, and repeatable configuration management generation Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including hardware, software, test, and operations to ensure smooth integration and field readiness Contribute to architectural decisions, sprint planning, and roadmap discussions to ensure scalable, maintainable systems Mentor peers, share best practices, and help foster a culture of engineering excellence across the team

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including systems or infrastructure-level development
Strong background in Python, with a solid understanding of performance, concurrency, and object-oriented programming
Experienced with a Python testing framework (e.g., unittest, pytest)
Experienced in REST API design, development, maintenance, and performance monitoring (e.g., FastAPI, Django REST Framework)
Experienced in building and testing software in CI/CD pipelines
Familiar with containerized applications including container creation (e.g., Docker), orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), and management (e.g., Amazon/Google/Azure Kubernetes services)
Familiar with database concepts (e.g., table design, migration, ACID transactions) and at least one common database engine (e.g., MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL)
Familiar with SQL
Strong collaboration and communication skills
Strong documentation and diagramming skills

Nice To Haves

Exposure to robotics, aerospace, embedded systems, or other mission-critical domains
Familiar with JSON Schema
Familiar with data validation (e.g., Pydantic)
Familiar with package and environment management (e.g., Pip, Conda)
Familiar with infrastructure-as-code management (e.g., Terraspace)
Familiar with web-based UI development (e.g., React, Vue)
Familiar with Rust

Responsibilities

Design, develop, and maintain mission-critical, Linux-based and cloud-based infrastructure supporting automated software configuration management (management of software configuration parameters)
Optimize system performance and reliability, with a focus on fast, robust, and repeatable configuration management generation
Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including hardware, software, test, and operations to ensure smooth integration and field readiness
Contribute to architectural decisions, sprint planning, and roadmap discussions to ensure scalable, maintainable systems
Mentor peers, share best practices, and help foster a culture of engineering excellence across the team

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!

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