Senior Mission Design and Navigation Engineer

relativity · Long Beach, California, United States · Long Beach, California, United States

<div class="content-intro">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.</div>About The Team: 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.    About the Role: As a Mission Design and Navigation Engineer within the Interplanetary Sciences Program, you will perform mission design activities for our 2028 Mars Orbiter mission. You will perform trajectory and navigation analyses that define how the spacecraft travels to Mars and achieves the orbital conditions required to accomplish its science mission.  As the program progresses toward flight, your responsibilities will expand into end-to-end ownership of mission design and navigation, including interplanetary trajectory design, Mars orbit design, orbit determination, navigation data processing, and interfaces with the Deep Space Network (DSN).  You will develop the engineering practices, processes, tools, interfaces, and software requirements needed to support mission design and flight navigation. You will work across spacecraft systems, GNC, communications, mission operations, and software teams to ensure the mission can be designed, navigated, and operated successfully from launch through Mars orbital operations.  Responsibilities include:  <ul> <li style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Own mission design and associated trajectory analysis for the 2028 Mars Orbiter mission</li> <li style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Develop and optimize interplanetary trajectories and Mars orbital trajectories subject to spacecraft, communications, ope

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