Senior Launch Vehicle Automation Engineer

Relativity Space; Long Beach (CA); On-site; USD 132,000 - 198,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity

PTO and sick leave

Parental leave

Learning and development stipend

Job summary

Relativity Space in Long Beach, CA is seeking an Automation Engineer to own the full lifecycle of automation development—from CONOPs through design, implementation, and verification. The role covers hardware and software, enabling autonomous vehicle operations during critical tests, hotfire, and launch.

You will define automation requirements across fluids, avionics, propulsion and mechanisms, write and review code, and verify system behavior within CI/CD pipelines.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering or a related field.
• 4+ years of relevant experience.
• Experience applying engineering fundamentals across a wide range of functional disciplines.
• Working literacy with one or more control-oriented software languages (Python, Rust, C++, etc).

Responsibilities

• Develop vehicle-level CONOPs for test, hotfire, and launch operations.
• Collaborate with Responsible Engineers to define automation requirements across subsystems.
• Define and maintain the architecture for vehicle automation software used in ground and flight operations.
• Author and review code.
• Validate automation using physics-backed models integrated into CI/CD workflows.
• Perform unit-, integration-, and system-level verification.
• Provide console support and perform pre- and post- operation data.

Skills

Python

Rust

C++

Education

Bachelor’s degree in engineering or related field

Job description

Relativity Space in Long Beach, CA is seeking an Automation Engineer to own the full lifecycle of automation development—from CONOPs through design, implementation, and verification. The role covers hardware and software, enabling autonomous vehicle operations during critical tests, hotfire, and launch.

You will define automation requirements across fluids, avionics, propulsion and mechanisms, write and review code, and verify system behavior within CI/CD pipelines.