Vehicle Simulation Engineer I

Vehicle Simulation Engineer I

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 Integrated Performance team owns the holistic view of how Terran R comes together, ensuring that every system on the vehicle and ground is capable of achieving our ambitious objectives. The team works across the full launch system, from trajectory design and aerodynamics to reliability analysis and beyond, with direct influence on all parts of the product lifecycle, from conceptual design to post-flight data review. Beyond analysis, team members engage hands-on with hardware and operations, with the mission and authority to drive meaningful programmatic change. With a unique organizational structure, the integrated performance team spans multiple technical domains and embeds directly with partner teams to solve the hardest multi-disciplinary problems. The team operates with a rare scale: large enough to support complex development, yet small enough that individual contributors have meaningful impact.

The Performance Team is responsible for driving interdisciplinary mission and vehicle design decisions across Relativity's Integrated Performance teams. In order to do so, the team has the following core responsibilities:

• Closely work with key design teams to integrate their latest design data into a full simulation of the customer missions
• Develop and leverage software tooling for optimizing the launch and orbital trajectory of each of the key customer missions.
• Lead interdisciplinary design trade analyses to inform key decisions about the vehicle, the mission trajectories, or the mission ConOps.
• Define and maintain high-level vehicle and trajectory design requirements to inform the overall design process.

About the Role

You will be responsible for:

• Carrying out analysis for engineering design trades and driving design decisions based on the results.
• Implementing, maintaining, and improving software tooling in a variety of languages, ranging from core simulation capabilities to peripheral analysis utilities.
• Maintaining, establishing, and sometimes leading cross-functional collaboration with key teams across Vehicle Engineering.

About You

An undergraduate or graduate degree (BS/MS/PhD) in Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, or related field

Demonstrated critical thinking skills and ability to solve problems from first principles.

Have previously worked on projects that required you to operate in multi-disciplinary teams.

Have previously worked on projects that required you to utilize numerical techniques such as ODE's and optimization routines.

Proficiency in high-level programming languages (e.g. Python, Julia, MATLAB).

Familiarity with launch vehicles and trajectory design.

Prior work in a startup or agile development environment.

Demonstrated experiences in taking complex analysis results and clearly communicating conclusions and recommendations to decision makers.

Experience working with advanced software development practices such as Docker, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), and dependency management.

Hiring Range: $119,000 - $150,700 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.