Lead Software Engineer - Factory Platform

Job Description

Job Description

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.

About the Team:

The Terrestrial Software team is building the foundation for an automated rocket factory and integrated launch platform. Their mission is to automate and streamline workflows across the entire lifecycle of Terran R, from raw material intake to launch operations and eventually manufacturing on Mars. Today, that means partnering directly with teams across design, materials, manufacturing, and test and launch to design, implement, and deploy end user enterprise-wide applications, industrial automation, data analytics infrastructure, and next-generation AI to solve real problems and accelerate progress. Long term, the team is laying the groundwork for a modular, scalable software platform that can power highly autonomous operations on Earth and beyond. This is a team for builders and thinkers who thrive on cross-functional impact and want to shape the digital backbone of our future in space.

About the Role:

As a Lead Software Engineer on the Factory Platform team, you'll combine hands-on technical leadership with direct people management. You'll own the full software development lifecycle for your squad — from concept and trade study through implementation, deployment, and iteration — while also being accountable for the growth, performance, and hiring of the engineers on your team.

• Manage a team of software engineers: conduct 1:1s, write and deliver performance reviews, support career development, and drive hiring
• Set and uphold engineering standards for your team: code quality, testing, deployment practices, incident response, and on-call culture
• Lead architectural design and trade studies for new features and systems across planning, scheduling, purchasing, manufacturing operations, and test data tooling
• Maintain meaningful individual contribution - you are expected to stay technically sharp and ship code, not just review it
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders (manufacturing, operations, propulsion, test & launch) to translate domain requirements into software
• Mentor and grow engineers at all levels; identify gaps in the team and close them through coaching or hiring

Technologies we use:

• Python, React, Typescript, Go
• Iceberg, BigQuery, Duckdb, DBT, Postgres
• AWS, GCP, Kubernetes (both cloud and on-prem), Terraform, Helm

About You:

• Bachelor's or higher in CS or a related engineering field
• 5+ years of software engineering experience across multiple production systems
• Proven track record hiring, retaining, and developing engineers
• Expert in React and modern frontend tooling
• Fluent in at least one backend language (Go, Python) and willing to range across the stack
• Comfortable driving architectural decisions and building buy-in across engineering and non-engineering stakeholders
• Strong written and verbal communication - you can write a crisp design doc and also give useful, timely feedback to a struggling engineer

Nice to haves but not required:

• 2+ years in an engineering management or tech lead-manager role, with direct reports
• Experience designing and scaling service architectures for high-performance frontend operations
• Background in systems-level programming (synchronization, memory management)
• Experience with low-latency or safety-critical software
• History of shipping software across large, multi-platform codebases

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.

Hiring Range:

$157,000—$235,000 USD

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.

If you need a reasonable accommodation, please contact us at View email address on ziprecruiter.com.