Senior Controls Engineer, Optical Beam Pointing

At Relativity Space, we’re building rockets to serve today’s needs and tomorrow’s breakthroughs. Our Terran R vehicle will deliver customer payloads to orbit, meeting the growing demand for launch capacity. But that’s just the start. Achieving commercial success with Terran R will unlock new opportunities to advance science, exploration, and innovation, pioneering progress that reaches beyond the known.

Joining Relativity means becoming part of something where autonomy, ownership, and impact exist at every level. Here, you're not just executing tasks; you're solving problems that haven’t been solved before, helping develop a rocket, a factory, and a business from the ground up. Whether you’re in propulsion, manufacturing, software, avionics, or a corporate function, you’ll collaborate across teams, shape decisions, and see your work come to life in record time. Relativity is a place where creativity and technical rigor go hand in hand, and your voice will help define the stories we’re writing together. Now is a unique moment in time where it’s early enough to leave your mark on the product, the process, and the culture, but far enough along that Terran R is tangible and picking up momentum. The most meaningful work of your career is waiting. Join us.

The Interplanetary Sciences Program was established to expand access to scientific exploration across our solar system. Its mission is to make planetary research faster, more affordable, and more capable than ever before by rethinking how science missions are designed, built, and operated. The program aims to enable scientists to send instruments to distant worlds without decades of development or prohibitive costs. By creating a sustainable model for interplanetary exploration, we are transforming space science from an occasional event into a continuous process of discovery that accelerates knowledge, broadens participation, and inspires the next generation of explorers.

• •Own the design, development, and implementation of optical beam pointing and control algorithms for the 2028 Mars Orbiter mission.
• •Develop control systems that integrate optical sensor measurements, gyroscopic data, and spacecraft attitude estimates to achieve precision beam pointing and tracking.
• •Design and implement fast steering mirror control algorithms that reject spacecraft jitter and maintain optical link performance during dynamic conditions.
• •Develop sensor fusion and state estimation algorithms that combine beacon position measurements with inertial sensing to enable robust pointing control.
• •Define requirements, interfaces, and verification methods for optical beam pointing performance, including acquisition, tracking, and pointing stability metrics.
• •Develop and maintain control system models, simulation environments, and analysis tools to predict and verify system performance.
• •Work with flight software developers to define software requirements, architectures, and interfaces for control algorithm implementation.
• •Support prototyping and ground testing of optical beam pointing systems, including hardware-in-the-loop testing and system-level verification.
• •Serve as technical authority for optical beam pointing and control, working across communications, GNC, spacecraft systems, and flight software teams.
• •Support flight operations during commissioning and on-orbit operations, including performance analysis and anomaly resolution.

• •An undergraduate or graduate degree (BS/MS/PhD) in Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Control Systems, Physics, or a similar technical discipline with 3+ years of related experience
• •Strong background in control systems design and implementation, including classical and modern control theory, state-space methods, and nonlinear control
• •Experience with spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control systems for launch vehicles, satellites, or other aerospace applications
• •Experience developing sensor fusion and state estimation algorithms, including Kalman filtering, observer design, or similar techniques
• •Strong software development skills in at least one high-level language (e.g. C++, Rust) and at least one scripting language (e.g. Python, Matlab)
• •Ability to work in a fast-paced startup environment with a high degree of autonomy and independence
• •Ability to complete projects with ownership of end-to-end solutions and deliver results on schedule
• •Ability to work across disciplines and clearly communicate technical decisions, requirements, and tradeoffs to engineering stakeholders