Sr Software Engineer, Compiler & Runtime

Relativity Space•Long Beach, FL

About The Position

On the Automation and Control Engineering (ACE) team, you will design, build, and operate the software that connects our automated factory, test facilities, and launch systems. ACE is responsible for the full stack—from the central platform down to the device-level software running on controllers and equipment—and your work will directly shape how Terran R is built, tested, and flown.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in systems programming (C++ or Rust) and/or programming language implementation, with strong fundamentals in compilers, interpreters, or virtual machines
Built or extended domain-specific languages or execution engines for hardware automation, scientific computation, trading, or other real-time domains where correctness, latency, and memory footprint matter
Comfortable designing fast, low-allocation code paths and reasoning about performance in terms of cache behavior, allocation patterns, and data layout
Excited to work on a proprietary language used for live hardware control and calculations, and to collaborate closely with users to evolve the language and runtime in a safety-critical context

Nice To Haves

Academic or industry background in compilers, static analysis, formal methods, or programming languages research
Experience implementing type systems, bytecode interpreters, JITs, or code generation pipelines optimized for low latency and small memory footprints
Experience building scriptable automation frameworks or configuration/DSL layers on top of C++/Rust systems used to orchestrate hardware, tests, or complex workflows
Familiarity with real-time scheduling, concurrency models, and fault-tolerance techniques used when a language or runtime is responsible for controlling physical equipment

Responsibilities

Own features end-to-end across the software development lifecycle: from problem framing and architecture through implementation, test, deployment, and operation
Build and maintain the platform services (real-time data pipelines, orchestration, UI, alerting), automation tooling and languages, and device-level software used by teams across the company to control and monitor real hardware
Partner directly with hardware, test, manufacturing, and launch teams to design, instrument, and continuously improve automation and control systems that are safe, observable, and resilient in production environments