Staff Thermal Engineer

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 Integrated Performance team owns the holistic view of how Terran R comes together, ensuring that every system on the vehicle and ground is capable of achieving our ambitious objectives. The team works across the full launch system, from trajectory design and aerodynamics to reliability analysis and beyond, with direct influence on all parts of the product lifecycle, from conceptual design to post-flight data review. Beyond analysis, team members engage hands-on with hardware and operations, with the mission and authority to drive meaningful programmatic change. With a unique organizational structure, the integrated performance team spans multiple technical domains and embeds directly with partner teams to solve the hardest multi-disciplinary problems. The team operates with a rare scale: large enough to support complex development, yet small enough that individual contributors have meaningful impact.

The Thermal team is responsible for predicting temperatures and designing thermal architectures for structures, fluids, components, and avionics on reusable launch vehicles. With a strong grasp of thermodynamics and all types of heat transfer, the team addresses a vast amount of thermal challenges across all forms of ground use and flight phases. Leveraging first principle hand calculations, reduced order modeling, as well as detailed thermal modeling, the team is able to drive cross disciplinary vehicle designs. Our collaboration with hardware engineers and all other teams further enables us to overcome design and integration hurdles, ensuring a seamless and efficient development process from concept and through launch.

About the Role:

• Drive the architecture, sizing, and development of thermal systems like insulation, heaters, thermal protection, and environmental conditioning in collaboration with peer technical teams
• Build, execute, and validate thermal analyses at the component, sub-system, and vehicle level, including relevant tool development and automation
• Direct design and development engineers in the successful application of thermal sciences to achieve system and component requirements
• Develop and execute tests to support thermal systems development and qualification, including hands-on work like test article integration, instrumentation setup, and data processing
• Support vehicle and engine thermal system development and stage testing as well as flight operations

About You:

• Undergraduate degree in engineering or related field
• 5+ years experience in thermal analysis
• Proficiency in component and system level thermal and fluids analysis, using relevant toolsets like Sinda/Fluint/Thermal Desktop or other commercial FEM/FDM/FVM solvers
• Experience in an analysis role on an integrated vehicle program
• Hands-on experience with writing test plans and performing testing, instrumentation, and data analysis at the component and system level
• Experience solving complex problems on integrated vehicles with design teams
• Experience with an engineering scripting language like MATLAB or Python

Nice to haves but not required:

• Graduate degree in engineering or related field
• 8+ years experience in thermal analysis
• Familiarity with liquid rocket stage, engine architecture, and operations
• Understanding of aerodynamics and external flight related heating
• Experience with launch vehicle thermal protection system materials and thermal protection system sizing
• Experience with start to finish design cycles of multiple vehicles

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:

$176,000-$225,500 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.