Relativity Space
Senior Software Engineer - Factory Platform
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.
Company Overview: At Relativity Space, we're entering an exciting new chapter under the leadership of Eric Schmidt, focusing on pioneering advancements in aerospace technology.
Mission Statement: Guided by a vision to redefine space exploration, our team, now led by Eric Schmidt, is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
Innovation Focus: Join us as we embark on groundbreaking projects in 3D printing and AI-driven manufacturing, spearheaded by our new CEO, Eric Schmidt.
About the Team:
Terrestrial Software is the central nervous system of Relativity Space, powering design, manufacturing, testing, and launch through a unified stack of enterprise applications, factory automation, and ground systems. Our goal is instant data accessibility and automated decision-making embedded in every workflow, removing friction and enabling fast, intelligent company-wide operations.
About the Role:
You'll build our entire in-house ERP stack from scratch - manufacturing execution systems (MES), production planning engines, and durable workflow orchestration that runs our factory autonomously. The core challenge is automating complex manufacturing processes that span weeks while handling failures gracefully. You'll join our 8-person Factory Platform team within the 40-person Terrestrial Software organization. Direct collaboration with manufacturing engineers, test engineers, and operations staff.
Day-to-day: Design workflow engines that coordinate hundreds of interdependent manufacturing steps. Build state machines that handle multi-week production cycles with automatic retry logic, human escalation, and rollback capabilities. Write planning algorithms that optimize schedules around material constraints, equipment availability, and test windows. Create fully-featured web applications used by technicians, engineers, and operators across the factory - everything from work order management to real-time process monitoring and intervention tools.
The challenge: Building enterprise software that doesn't suck. Durable workflow execution across weeks-long manufacturing cycles, automated decision-making with human oversight, and state management for hundreds of concurrent processes. Plus planning algorithms that optimize around physical constraints and real-time factory conditions.
Stack:
- Backend: Python, Go, Postgres
- Frontend: React, TypeScript
- Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Terraform, DBT, Spark
- Data: Iceberg, DuckDB, Redshift
About You:
- 7+ years shipping production software
- Expert-level React and modern frontend patterns
- Experience designing and maintaining service architectures that support complex business workflows
- Strong track record working directly with users to gather requirements, validate assumptions, and iterate on solutions
- Experience implementing reliable workflows at scale - handling failure scenarios, state recovery, and distributed coordination
- CS/Engineering degree or equivalent depth
Nice to haves but not required:
- Systems programming background, workflow orchestration experience (Temporal, Airflow, etc.), or manufacturing automation domain knowledge.
At Relativity Space, we are committed to transparency and fairness in our compensation practices. Actual compensation will be determined based on experience, qualifications, and other job-related factors.
Compensation is only one part of our total rewards package. Relativity Space offers competitive salary and equity, a generous PTO and sick leave policy, parental leave, an annual learning and development stipend, and more! To see some of the benefits & perks we offer, please visit here.
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.
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