Sr RF & Telemetry Engineer

Company Overview:  

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: 

The Avionics team is responsible for the full lifecycle of all electronics and supporting hardware central to operating Relativity's rockets. The team designs, builds, tests, integrates, and operates the hardware which controls the rocket in flight, downlinks critical telemetry, keeps the public safe, and deploys our customers' payloads to orbit! Our hardware enables Relativity to reliably control our rockets while maintaining the flexibility to rapidly iterate our designs. As a member of this team, you will design innovative hardware solutions capable of surviving harsh launch and space environments. Your designs will support multiple vehicle systems such as sensors, propulsion, computing, actuation, energy management, and communications.

About the Role: 

• Drive the development of the flight and ground RF & Telemetry system for our launch vehicles through all phases of the development process including design, integration, test, and launch
• Create link budgets for various vehicle RF systems
• Model antenna radiation patterns and simulate vehicle-level antenna performance
• Develop the architecture for vehicle ground and vehicle RF systems, including S and L band systems
• Select COTS parts or design custom components such as antennas, RF passives, PAs and LNAs, transmitters/receivers, and GSE
• Participate in the hardware and software integration and test of flight and ground telemetry hardware and software
• Support regulatory and licensing activities with government and regulatory bodies such as the FCC, ITU, and USSF
• Assist in building and mentoring a team of multidisciplinary telemetry engineers including RF engineers, communication software engineers, and ground station engineers

About You:  

• Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field
• 7+ years of experience in RF and telemetry system engineering
• Experience with antenna design and modeling tools such as Ansys HFSS
• Experience developing link budgets
• Experience with the design and selection of RF passive components such as couplers and filters
• Experience with the design and integration of RF systems consisting of radio transmitters and receivers, LNAs, PAs, couplers, filters, etc.
• Experience with RF test equipment such as spectrum analyzers, SDRs, and data recorders

Nice to haves but not required:  

• Experience mentoring engineers in engineering best-practices and domain-specific technical principles
• Comfortable communicating deeply technical topics to a wide variety of audiences
• Familiarity with telemetry standards standards such as IRIG-106
• Experience designing active RF electronics such as PAs, LNAs, and/or radio transceivers
• Software engineering fluency and experience with C++, Python, and/or MATLAB
• Experience establishing a ground station network for launch vehicles or satellite systems

Relativity Space offers competitive salary and equity, a generous vacation policy, an annual L&D stipend and more! 

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.