Senior Vehicle Dynamics Engineer

Long Beach, California

At Relativity Space, we have two audacious goals: to build the next great commercial launch company with Terran R and to become America's leading force in additive manufacturing innovation. Both contribute to our long-term vision of creating humanity’s industrial base on Mars, paving the way for interplanetary life to expand the possibilities of the human experience. This journey begins right here on Earth – where we design, build, and fly rockets to deliver customer payloads to orbit. Terran R, our medium-to-heavy lift reusable rocket, fulfills the growing demand for launch capacity, thanks to our iterative approach that accelerates design, testing, and development while minimizing costs. While our groundbreaking research and development in 3D printing pushes the boundaries of large-scale additive manufacturing.

Your journey with us is more than just a job – it’s an opportunity to shape the future of aerospace technology, additive manufacturing, and the human experience alongside a community of passionate, creative individuals. Join us on this extraordinary journey, as we work together to transform our vision into reality.

About the Team:  

Relativity’s Integrated Performance teams ensure that our products work across all systems and disciplines, from trajectory design to aerodynamics to reliability analysis and beyond. Our groups size the Terran R rocket, design its missions for customer success, reliability, and reusability, and ensure that every system on the rocket and ground is engineered correctly for the demanding environments of launch and entry. Recently, we completed the preliminary design and analysis of Terran R including Relativity’s first-ever work on launch vehicle reusability, spanning advanced trajectory simulations, wind tunnel testing, and structures analysis, among many other projects.

The Dynamic Environments team works problems involving vibration, shock and acoustics on the Terran R program spanning vehicle, engine, and ground systems. We work collaboratively with other Flight Sciences teams, Stage Engineering, Propulsion, Avionics, Test and Launch teams to develop analysis tools and test levels and loads on time and budget while meeting our technical requirements. A high degree of autonomy along with an ability to prioritize work in our fast-paced environment is required.

About the Role: 

  • Derive random vibration, shock, and acoustic levels and loads across vehicle, engine, and ground systems to help mature hardware designs.
  • Work with hardware Responsible Engineers (REs) to make sure your results are used consistently with analysis assumptions and to resolve dynamics issues.
  • Work with partner teams in Flight Sciences to develop/ingest aerodynamic, acoustic, engine, and separation forcing functions.
  • Support component, engine, and stage test campaigns on aspects relevant to vibration, shock, acoustics.
  • Mature analysis processes, including custom and commercial tool selection and implementation, workflow automation, methodology development, and data and results processing and communication.
  • Drive high speed instrumentation selection and guidance with collaboration across Loads, Aerodynamics, Propulsion, Avionics, Test and Launch teams.
  • Collaborate with hardware owners across company to simplify and streamline analysis workflows, and to identify opportunities to mitigate dynamic environments issues where needed.

About You:  

  • Undergraduate degree in Aerospace or Mechanical Engineering or a related field
  • 5+ years relevant experience
  • Experience deriving random vibration, shock, and acoustic levels and loads
  • Experience with instrumentation, signal processing, time and frequency domain analysis, statistical analysis
  • Proficiency in Python or similar

Nice to haves but not required:  

  • A graduate degree in engineering or related field
  • 8+ years relevant experience across 1 or more full program lifecycles
  • Experience managing and developing analysis toolsets and workflows using both custom and commercial software
  • Hands-on experience with testing, instrumentation, and data analysis at the component and system levels
  • Familiarity in multiple technical domains (e.g. Propulsion, Fluids, Aerodynamics, Structures)

At Relativity Space, we are committed to transparency and fairness in our compensation practices. Actual compensation will be determined based on experience, qualifications, and other job-related factors.

Compensation is only one part of our total rewards package. Relativity Space offers competitive salary and equity, a generous PTO and sick leave policy, parental leave, an annual learning and development stipend, and more! To see some of the benefits & perks we offer, please visit here.

Hiring Range:

$130,000 - $166,000 USD

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

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