Job Description

Company Overview:  

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.

About the Team:  

Relativity’s Integrated Performance teams ensure that our products work across all systems and disciplines, from trajectory design to aerodynamics to reliability analysis and beyond. Our groups size the Terran R rocket, design its missions for customer success, reliability, and reusability, and ensure that every system on the rocket and ground is engineered correctly for the demanding environments of launch and entry. Recently, we completed the preliminary design and analysis of Terran R including Relativity’s first-ever work on launch vehicle reusability, spanning advanced trajectory simulations, wind tunnel testing, and structures analysis, among many other projects.

The Aerodynamics team shapes Relativity’s vehicle products by tackling intricate design challenges inherent to reusable launch vehicles. Drawing on a strong foundation in external and compressible flows, the team addresses a wide spectrum of aerodynamic challenges across all flight phases. Leveraging computational fluid dynamics (CFD), wind tunnel testing, reduced order modeling, and flight data, we take a proactive approach to supporting cross-disciplinary design initiatives. Our collaboration with hardware engineers further enables us to overcome design and integration hurdles, ensuring a seamless and efficient development process from concept and through launch.

About the Role: 

As an Aerodynamics Engineer II, you will play a key role in shaping Relativity’s vehicle products by helping to solve interdisciplinary design challenges involving Aerodynamics. Your experience will enable you to proactively identify and execute analyses that support cross-discipline design efforts and analysis teams. Your foundation in external and compressible flows will be applied to a variety of Aerodynamic tasks including wind tunnel testing, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and working with hardware engineers to solve design and integration challenges.

Here are some examples of projects you could be working on:

• Contribute to the planning and execution of wind tunnel test campaigns
• Construct aerodynamic databases from CFD, wind tunnel, and empirical models (e.g., DATCOM)
• Utilize and execute CFD analyses that supports component design and database development
• Collaborate with hardware engineers to size and shape aero surfaces that meet design requirements
• Specify test and flight instrumentation including sensor type, sampling requirements, and locations

Success in this role requires self-motivation, adaptability, and the ability to contribute significantly to a fast-paced, integrated vehicle program. On a weekly basis, you will be performing analysis, aiding in the development of software tools, and supporting design teams. You will also use your strong organizational skills to properly manage the documentation and communication of your actions, recommendations, and decisions.

About You:  

• A graduate degree in engineering or related field, and 3+ years relevant experience
• Demonstrated proficiency in aerodynamic fundamentals, including external and compressible flows
• Experience solving cross-disciplinary design problems on integrated vehicles
• Proficiency in Python and experience with CFD tools like Star-CCM+, Fun3D, etc.

Nice to haves but not required:  

• Relevant experience across a complete program lifecycle
• Experience with unsteady aerodynamic flow fields (buffet) including empirical methods and test data

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.

Relativity Space offers competitive salary and equity, a generous vacation policy, L&D stipend and more! Learn more here!

The below-range represents Relativity Space’s current good-faith pay scale for this role.  Relativity Space reserves the right to modify or update this range at any time.

Compensation is only one part of our entire total rewards package. To see some of the benefits & perks we offer, please visit here: https://px.sequoia.com/relativityspace

Hiring Range:

$111,000—$142,000 USD

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