Software Engineer, Operations

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:

The Interplanetary Sciences Program is building the operations software that will optimize the mission science and innovate in how we operate the spacecraft. The software will command, monitor, and coordinate the spacecraft, its science instruments, and its communications systems across the Mars 2028 mission. At Relativity Space, we set audacious goals. The Mars 2028 mission is designed to transform how we conduct interplanetary science missions bringing AI models to run on the spacecraft in Mars orbit. The instrument suite will sense the atmosphere to inform weather models and probe the surface with Radar to understand the location of ice. The mission operations for the Mars 2028 mission will also be ground-breaking with automation across the whole stack to enable autonomous science collection meaning the spacecraft can be re-tasked to acquire follow-up observations based on analysis and inference of recent data on the flight hardware. 

As a Software Engineer – Operations, you will design and build the tools that mission operators, instrument teams, and external partners rely on every day from command generation and validation, to telemetry and data dissemination, to the interfaces that let outside teams safely and reliably interact with our systems. This is a high ownership and hands-on engineering role at the intersection of software, spacecraft operations, and cross-team collaboration, with real influence over how the mission is run. 

Operations software is the layer between a spacecraft hundreds of millions of kilometers away and the humans, instruments, and partner organizations that depend on it working correctly, every time. The tools you build will directly shape how safely and efficiently this mission commands its spacecraft, ingests its science data, and supports the instrument teams counting on us to get it right. 

What You'll Do:

• Design and implement operations software: Build, test, and operate spacecraft commanding tools — including command generation, validation, sequencing, and constraint-checking software — using modern engineering practices and AI-assisted / agentic development tools to accelerate implementation without compromising rigor. 
• Work cross-functionally: partner with mission operations, GN&C, flight software, instrument, and ground systems teams inside Relativity Space, as well as external partners and instrument providers, to translate operational needs into working software. 
• Build test suites: build automated test suites and validation frameworks covering spacecraft commanding, telemetry processing, and data dissemination — including regression tests, simulation/flatsat-based validation, and hardware-in-the-loop test support — so that changes to operations software can be verified quickly and safely before they touch the mission. 
• Define external interfaces: define and document the interfaces (ICDs, APIs, data formats) that instrument teams and other external stakeholders use to interact with operations tools, ensuring those interfaces are clear, stable, and well-supported across the life of the mission. 
• Automate tooling for commanding, telemetry visualization, anomaly investigation, and data pipelines as mission needs change over time. 

About You:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 3+ years of software engineering experience, ideally including some exposure to mission operations, ground systems, command and control, or other safety- or mission-critical software
• Strong software fundamentals and hands-on proficiency with Python or a comparable language
• Experience designing and writing automated test suites (unit, integration, and/or regression tests) for complex or safety-critical systems
• Experience defining or working against external-facing interfaces or APIs (ICDs, schemas, protocol definitions) shared with other teams or organizations
• Comfort working cross-functionally with engineers, operators, and external partners who may have very different technical backgrounds and priorities
• Experience with agentic development tools (e.g., AI coding agents/assistants) as part of a professional software engineering workflow, including knowing when and how to verify their output in a mission-critical context

During critical mission phases including launch, commissioning, cruise maneuvers and early operations this position will require shift work and on-call availability. Schedule flexibility will be needed as operational needs evolve. Occasional travel (<10%) to partner institutions and mission integration sites may be required