Senior Software Engineer, Backend

Long Beach, California

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:

At Relativity Space, we're entering an exciting new chapter under the leadership of Eric Schmidt, focusing on pioneering advancements in aerospace technology. Guided by a vision to redefine space exploration, our team is committed to pushing the boundaries of what's possible on Earth and beyond. As we pursue audacious goals like building the next great commercial launch company and becoming America’s leader in additive manufacturing, innovation is central to everything we do.

Terrestrial Software is the central nervous system of Relativity Space, powering design, manufacturing, testing, and launch through a unified stack of enterprise applications, factory automation, and ground systems. This team enables instant data accessibility and automated decision-making embedded in every workflow, removing friction and accelerating intelligent, company-wide operations.

Under Eric Schmidt’s leadership, we are embarking on groundbreaking projects in 3D printing and AI-driven manufacturing. The Terrestrial Software team is at the forefront of this innovation developing the digital infrastructure that supports and scales every aspect of our mission. If you're driven to build the tools that power the future of aerospace and redefine what’s possible, this is where your impact begins.

About the Role:

Design, develop and lead creation of core data components of our factory and launch software platform including:

  • Data technology abstraction and API development
  • Analytics and Reporting architectures
  • Data modeling, management, and development
  • Cloud and On-prem Application / Services / API development

In this role, you will be responsible for driving development of a distributed data platform spanning launch to factory components. You’ll be designing and creating technologies enabling data ingress/egress for the launch vehicle as well as core factory tools such as our Stargate printers. You’ll be making key tradeoff decisions, mentoring junior engineers, building new systems/tooling, and recommending / drive high impact across existing systems.

About You:

  • Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field.
  • 6+ years of experience implementing code level patterns to enable codebases and teams to scale, with 1+ years of experience leading data architectures at scale.
  • 4+ years of experience leveraging an array of data technologies including one or many of the following: InfluxDB, MongoDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Kafka, Spark, and more.
  • 4+ years of experience with at least one of C++, Go, Python, C#, Typescript.
  • Familiarity with agile methodologies.
  • Familiarity with containerization and deployment technologies like Kubernetes and Docker.

Nice to haves but not required:  

  • Machine Learning, AI, and other related technologies.
  • Demonstrated ability to create scalable architectures across an array of usage patterns and organizations.
  • Demonstrated ability to learn, grow and mentor others to drive best practices and/or accelerate development lifecycles.
  • Demonstrated ability to plan organizational roadmaps and hiring strategies.
  • Familiarity with other modern languages like Go and Rust.

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:

$165,000 - $211,000 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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