Sr Software Engineer, Compiler & Runtime

Relativity Space•Long Beach, CA

3d•$154,000 - $211,000

About The Position

Relativity Space is building rockets to serve today’s needs and tomorrow’s breakthroughs. The Terran R vehicle will deliver customer payloads to orbit, meeting the growing demand for launch capacity. 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. You'll be solving problems that haven’t been solved before, helping develop a rocket, a factory, and a business from the ground up. Collaboration across teams, shaping decisions, and seeing your work come to life in record time are key aspects of working here. Creativity and technical rigor go hand in hand, and your voice will help define the stories being written together. This is a unique moment in time to leave your mark on the product, the process, and the culture, with Terran R tangible and picking up momentum. The most meaningful work of your career is waiting. About the Team: Relativity Space is on a mission to better connect humanity to space and the universe beyond our planet. The Terrestrial Software team is building the foundation for an automated rocket factory and integrated launch platform. Their mission is to automate and streamline workflows across the entire lifecycle of Terran R, from raw material intake to launch operations and eventually manufacturing on Mars. This involves partnering directly with teams across design, materials, manufacturing, and test and launch to design, implement, and deploy end-user enterprise-wide applications, industrial automation, data analytics infrastructure, and next-generation AI to solve real problems and accelerate progress. Long term, the team is laying the groundwork for a modular, scalable software platform that can power highly autonomous operations on Earth and beyond. This is a team for builders and thinkers who thrive on cross-functional impact and want to shape the digital backbone of our future in space. About the Role: 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