Senior FPGA Engineer — Flight‑Critical DSP/SDR Lead

Relativity Space; Long Beach (CA); On-site; USD 148,000 - 222,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

PTO & sick leave

Parental leave

Learning stipend

Job summary

Relativity Space is seeking an FPGA engineer to analyze, design, and test custom FPGA firmware for the Terran R vehicle. You will oversee FPGA development across products, from concept to flight maturity, working with cross-functional teams to ensure timely decisions and robust hardware.

You will apply deep electronics design expertise and strong project management to keep avionics on schedule, delivering reliable, high-performance digital systems for a cutting-edge rocket program.

Qualifications

• Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field
• 5+ years of FPGA development with DSP/SDR for mission-critical systems such as launch vehicles, spacecraft, aircraft, or robotics
• Strong grounding in digital communications theory: modulation schemes, matched filtering, synchronization (timing/carrier recovery), equalization, and forward error correction
• Proficiency in DSP fundamentals: multirate signal processing, filter design, FFT-based processing, and fixed-point quantization analysis
• Technical expertise in FPGA development across the full lifecycle — RTL design, verification, synthesis, timing analysis, and bring-up/validation — with algorithms in VHDL, Verilog, or SystemVerilog
• Familiarity with code generation or High Level Synthesis (HLS) languages including SpinalHDL, Chisel, Vitis, SystemC, or Simulink
• Experience with high-speed data converter interfaces (JESD204B/C or similar) feeding DSP pipelines
• Experience with hardware bring-up, validation, debugging, and data analysis
• Familiarity with FPGA toolchains and SoC platforms across AMD Xilinx, Intel, Microchip, etc.

Responsibilities

• Analyze, design, and test custom FPGA firmware on the Terran R vehicle
• Oversee development for FPGAs across multiple products through the lifecycle from concept to flight maturity
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure best decisions for the overall vehicle
• Ensure hardware projects are reliable and on-schedule to support Terran R launch

Skills

FPGA development

DSP/SDR

Digital communications

VHDL

Verilog

SystemVerilog

JESD204B

Cross-functional teamwork

Education

Bachelors degree in Electrical/Computer Engineering

Tools

SpinalHDL

Chisel

Vitis

SystemC

Simulink

MATLAB

Job description

Relativity Space is seeking an FPGA engineer to analyze, design, and test custom FPGA firmware for the Terran R vehicle. You will oversee FPGA development across products, from concept to flight maturity, working with cross-functional teams to ensure timely decisions and robust hardware.

You will apply deep electronics design expertise and strong project management to keep avionics on schedule, delivering reliable, high-performance digital systems for a cutting-edge rocket program.