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 Thermal team is responsible for predicting temperatures and designing thermal architectures for structures, fluids, components, and avionics on reusable launch vehicles. With a strong grasp of thermodynamics and all types of heat transfer, the team addresses a vast amount of thermal challenges across all forms of ground use and flight phases. Leveraging first principle hand calculations, reduced order modeling, as well as detailed thermal modeling, the team is able to drive cross disciplinary vehicle designs. Our collaboration with hardware engineers and all other teams further enables us to overcome design and integration hurdles, ensuring a seamless and efficient development process from concept and through launch.

About the Role:

• Drive the architecture, sizing, and development of thermal systems like insulation, heaters, thermal protection, and environmental conditioning in collaboration with peer technical teams
• Build, execute, and validate thermal analyses at the component, sub-system, and vehicle level, including relevant tool development and automation
• Direct design and development engineers in the successful application of thermal sciences to achieve system and component requirements
• Develop and execute tests to support thermal systems development and qualification, including hands-on work like test article integration, instrumentation setup, and data processing
• Support vehicle and engine thermal system development and stage testing as well as flight operations

About You:

• Undergraduate degree in engineering or related field
• 2+ years experience in thermal analysis
• Proficiency in component and system level thermal and fluids analysis, using relevant toolsets like Sinda/Fluint/Thermal Desktop or other commercial FEM/FDM/FVM solvers
• Hands-on experience with writing test plans and performing testing, instrumentation, and data analysis at the component and system level
• Experience solving complex problems on integrated vehicles with design teams
• Experience with an engineering scripting language like MATLAB or Python

Nice to Haves, but Not Required:

• Graduate degree in engineering or related field
• Familiarity with liquid rocket stage, engine architecture, and operations
• Experience in an analysis role on an integrated vehicle program
• Understanding of aerodynamics and external flight related heating
• Experience with launch vehicle thermal protection system materials and thermal protection system sizing
• Experience with start to finish design cycles of multiple vehicles