GNC Trajectory Design Engineer I – 2025 New Grad @ Relativity Space

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 team you will be joining is responsible for driving interdisciplinary mission and vehicle design decisions across Relativity’s Integrated Performance teams.

About the Role:

You will be responsible for:

Integrating the latest design data from key design teams into a full simulation of customer missions
Developing and leveraging software to optimize the launch and orbital trajectory of customer missions
Leading interdisciplinary design trades to inform key decisions about the vehicle, the mission trajectories, or the mission ConOps
Defining and maintaining high-level vehicle and trajectory design requirements to inform the overall design process

About You:

An undergraduate or graduate degree (BS/MS/PhD) in Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, or a related field
Experience working on projects that required you to operate in interdisciplinary design teams
Have previously worked on projects that required you to utilize numerical techniques such as ODE’s and optimization routines
Experience with high-level programming languages (e.g. Python, Julia, MATLAB)

Nice to haves but not required:

Demonstrated critical thinking skills and ability to solve problems from first principles
Familiarity with launch vehicles and trajectory design
Prior work in a startup or agile development environment
Demonstrated experience 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

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:

$118,000—$123,000 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.

GNC Trajectory Design Engineer I – 2025 New Grad

Relativity Space

Compensation Overview

6 month growth

1 year growth

2 year growth

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

What critics are saying

What makes Relativity Space unique

Benefits