Storage Platform Software Responsible Engineer

At Relativity Space were building rockets to serve todays needs and tomorrows breakthroughs. OurTerran R vehicle will deliver customer payloads to orbit meeting the growing demand for launchcapacity. But thats just the start. Achieving commercial success with Terran R will unlock newopportunities to advance science exploration and innovation pioneering progress that reaches beyondthe known.

Joining Relativity means becoming part of something where autonomy ownership and impact exist at every level. Here youre not just executing tasks; youre solving problems that havent been solved before helping develop a rocket a factory and a business from the ground up. Whether youre in propulsion manufacturing software avionics or a corporate function youll 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 were writing together. Nowis a unique moment in time where its early enough to leave your mark on the product the process andthe culture but far enough along that Terran R is tangible and picking up momentum. The mostmeaningful work of your career is waiting. Join us.

About the Team:

The Interplanetary Sciences Program wasestablishedto 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 andoperated. 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.

About the Role:

The storage platform is one of the foundations foraccelerating scientific discovery: science instruments write to it onboard AI reads from it and the communications subsystems downlink the data on it to Earth.

You will define the storage architectureand build it yourself. This is not a role where someone else hands you a design and you implement it anditsnot a role where you write architecture documents and hand them to someone else to will make the foundational architectural decisions (redundancy topology replication strategy failure domain boundaries consistency guarantees write-lifecycle management) buildand testprototypeson commodity hardwareand then build the low-level systemscode that makes those decisions real: storage drivers filesystem integration and fault recovery systems that survive radiation upsets across the full mission the design from proof-of-concept on commodity hardware through integration on flight hardwarevalidatingevery architectural assumption with fault injection testing along the way.

• Own the redundancy and replication architecture acrossmultipleNAS units on two independent hardware strings defining the consistency model for cross-string replication the precise bound on acceptable data loss during a radiation-induced crash and the storage platforms contractual guarantees in every degraded state:drivelevel NAS unit or full string this as the failure mode matrix that drives every implementation decision downstream
• Select the filesystem and design the pool architecture confirming or revising the current ZFS baseline and owning the final configuration. Validate through quantitative reliability modeling that balance upset probability rebuild risk write endurance and usable capacity over the full mission
• Define the write-endurance budget for a multi-year operational lifetime allocating write capacity across continuous science ingest continuous data reduction periodic bulk reanalysis by onboard AI and archival snapshots to produce data retention policies that retain key science data through end of mission
• Design the interface contracts between the storage platformand the science instrument computeand communication subsystemsdefining what the storage platform guarantees what itdoesnt and what happens when a consumer violates the contract while the platform is already in a degraded state
• Build the storage fault detection and recovery path at the hardware boundary(e.g. kernel driver block layer or firmware level)to take a radiation-induced upset frominitialdetection through filesystem re-integration and ensure transient failures never become data loss
• Build automated fault recovery that handles every scenario in the failure mode matrixvalidatedthrough sustained fault injection campaigns on the hardware-in-the-loop testbed to confirm the architecture performs as specified under real failure conditions.

About You:

• Demonstrated ability to make and defend architectural tradeoffs in writing: design documents RFCs or equivalents that other engineers built against
• 7 years experience designing software systems for high reliability over long operational lifetimes: defining redundancy topology failure domain boundaries and degraded-mode behavior
• Track record of reasoning about failure modes before they occur: identifying what breaks defining impact radius and designing recovery paths at the system level not just the component level
• Experience working at or near the storage system boundary in kernel driver firmware storage infrastructure or equivalent developments where you had to reason about hardware behavior and failure modes
• Experience with storage systems that maintain data integrity under faults (copy-on-write filesystems log-structured storage RAID architectures or replication systems)

Nice to haves but not required:

• Familiarity with distributed storage replication models: synchronous vs. async quorum systems chain replication and opinions about when each is appropriate
• Experience designing storage or data systems that must remain available and consistent across independent failure domains
• Experience defining interface contracts between storage platforms and upstream consumers databases data pipelines application frameworks
• Depth in one or more of: filesystem internals block layer and device management storage protocol implementation or fault-tolerant storage infrastructure
• Strong working knowledge of storage data structures and systems reasoning Merkle trees NVMe submission/completion queue ring buffers hash tables radix trees
• Hands-on experience at the driver/hardware boundary: DMA coherency MMIO semantics PCIe enumeration and cache behavior
• Experience testing storage systems under fault injection: PCIe/NVMe resets error storms low-level tracing (ftrace/perf/bpftrace) and crash dump analysis (kdump/vmcore)

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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