Lead Space Radar Engineer for Mars Orbiter

Relativity Space; Long Beach (CA); Hybrid; USD 175,000 - 263,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

PTO and sick leave

Learning stipend

Job summary

Relativity Space seeks a technical lead and responsible engineer for a wideband UHF shallow radar sounder on a Mars orbiter mission. You will own the instrument from design through spacecraft integration, calibration, and commissioning with no mid-stream hand‑off.

You will lead system design for radar electronics, implement waveform baselines, coordinate across RF, digital, power, and mechanical teams, and guide testing from brassboard to flight while partnering with science teams to meet

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in electrical hardware development, such as software defined radios, radar transceivers, or sophisticated digital processors.
• Demonstrated ability to develop and manage radar system performance budgets.
• Experience with analysis and modeling of radar returns and radar performance.
• Experience implementing radio or radar transceivers as software‑defined radios.
• Field testing, flight testing, or spaceflight experience with radio or radar transceivers.
• Deep expertise in one or more of the following: FPGA/GPU signal processing, mixed‑signal and digital PCBs, RF circuit design, antenna design.

Responsibilities

• Own the system design for the radar electronics, signal processing chain, and antenna system at the vehicle level for both sounder and radiometer modes, including budgets and analyses.
• Lead waveform trade studies and implement baselines with science partners.
• Lead hardware development and brass-board validation ahead of flight designs.
• Define the instrument calibration scheme for radar and radiometer modes.
• Coordinate hardware development across RF, digital, power, and mechanical disciplines; manage firmware/software.
• Lead instrument qualification, integration into spacecraft, and terrestrial testing; oversee data review.
• Perform spectrum licensing and frequency coordination for operation and testing.

Skills

Radar systems

SDR

FPGA/GPU processing

RF design

Antenna design

Tools

RFSoC FPGA

Zynq UltraScale+

Job description

Relativity Space seeks a technical lead and responsible engineer for a wideband UHF shallow radar sounder on a Mars orbiter mission. You will own the instrument from design through spacecraft integration, calibration, and commissioning with no mid-stream hand‑off.

You will lead system design for radar electronics, implement waveform baselines, coordinate across RF, digital, power, and mechanical teams, and guide testing from brassboard to flight while partnering with science teams to meet