Staff Materials & Process 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

Awerx is a team within Relativity Space building agentic design tools for aerospace. The team focuses on agentic mechanical engineering and advanced manufacturing: systems that reason about geometry, materials, and process alongside the engineers who use them. The goal is design tools that produce parts that are not just analyzable, but buildable, qualifiable, and right the first time. You’ll work where software meets hardware, turning hard-won shop-floor knowledge into tools that change how aerospace hardware gets designed and built.

This role requires on-site presence at least three days per week, with flexibility to work remotely when the work allows. Much of the work is hands-on and best done alongside the engineers and hardware it supports.

About the Role

As a Staff Materials and Process Engineer, you’ll bring deep metallurgical and manufacturing-process expertise into the Awerx design-for-manufacturing (DFM) systems. You’ll turn what you know about how metals solidify, deform, crack, and machine into the rules, models, and constraints our agents use to design and plan aerospace hardware. The focus is hybrid manufacturing. That means multi-additive routes that combine processes such as sintered metal powder and wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM), and additive-plus-subtractive workflows that pair deposition with CNC finishing. Few tools reason well about these process chains today. You’ll help define how ours should, then build coupons and parts to prove it.

• Encode metallurgy and process knowledge into Awerx DFM systems as design rules, process windows, material models, and manufacturability checks, including how agents reason about multi-additive builds, process interfaces, and deposition-to-machining handoffs
• Develop process guidance for directed energy deposition (WAAM and other DED), CNC machining, and their combination, covering near-net-shape allowances, fixturing, distortion, and inspection access
• Characterize how process route drives microstructure, residual stress, defects, and properties in nickel superalloys, copper alloys, aluminum, and titanium, and build the materials and process datasets the agents depend on, with clear provenance and uncertainty
• Plan and run validation programs hands-on in lab and shop environments, including coupons, test articles, heat treatment, NDE, metallography, and mechanical testing, to confirm or correct what the tools predict
• Lead materials and process qualification of hybrid-manufactured hardware, including qualification plans, process controls, and statistically based design allowables in line with NAVSEA requirements and MMPDS methodology
• Collaborate with software engineers, designers, Relativity’s production, materials, and quality teams, and outside suppliers to specify and review tool features, evaluate agent-generated designs and process plans, and turn tacit shop knowledge and recurring failure modes into clear, explicit constraints

About You

• Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science, Metallurgy, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field
• 10+ years of materials and process engineering experience on aerospace or other high-reliability metal hardware
• Expertise in physical metallurgy across nickel superalloys, copper alloys, aluminum, and titanium, including solidification, phase transformations, heat treatment, and defect formation
• Hands-on experience developing or qualifying directed energy deposition processes (WAAM, laser DED, or electron-beam DED) and integrating them with CNC machining
• Experience designing and running test programs (coupons, metallography, NDE, mechanical testing) and generating statistically based design allowables (A- and B-basis) to NAVSEA, MMPDS, or comparable requirements
• Proficiency in Python or a similar language for data analysis and scripting

Nice to haves but not required

• PhD in Materials Science, Metallurgy, or a related field
• Experience with sintered-powder routes (binder jet, metal injection molding, press-and-sinter) or laser powder bed fusion, including multi-material or bimetallic interfaces such as copper-to-superalloy transitions
• Experience with ICME, CALPHAD, or thermo-mechanical process simulation for additive manufacturing, or with CAM and deposition path planning
• Experience qualifying additive parts for flight under NASA-STD-6030 or comparable standards, or applying machine learning to materials or process data

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

$150,000 - $226,000 USD