Senior FPGA Engineer, Digital Signal Processing Verified today

About the Team

The Avionics team owns the full lifecycle of Terran R's nervous system: designing, building, testing, installing, and operating hardware that connects and controls every major electrical system on the vehicle and ground. You'll work closely with propulsion, GNC, fluids, and stage engineering teams to ensure seamless integration and operation.

About the Role

As an FPGA engineer on the digital electronics team, you will analyze, design, and test custom FPGA firmware on the Terran R launch vehicle. You will oversee FPGA development across multiple products through the entire lifecycle from concept to flight maturity, including initial design, board bring-up, design verification, qualification, initial flight production, integration, and vehicle operations. You will work with cross-functional teams to make decisions that support Terran R's launch schedule and vehicle reliability.

What You'll Need

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field
• 5+ years of FPGA development with substantial experience in DSP/SDR applications for mission-critical systems such as launch vehicles, spacecraft, aircraft, or robotics
• Strong grounding in digital communications theory: modulation schemes, matched filtering, synchronization (timing/carrier recovery), equalization, and forward error correction
• Proficiency in DSP fundamentals: multirate signal processing, filter design, FFT-based processing, and fixed-point quantization analysis
• Technical expertise in FPGA development across the full lifecycle: RTL design, verification, synthesis, timing analysis, and bring-up/validation with algorithms implemented in VHDL, Verilog, or SystemVerilog
• Experience with one or more code generation or High Level Synthesis (HLS) languages including SpinalHDL, Chisel, Vitis, SystemC, or Simulink
• Experience with high-speed data converter interfaces (JESD204B/C or similar) feeding DSP pipelines
• Experience with hardware bring-up, validation, debugging, and data analysis
• Familiarity with a wide variety of FPGA toolchains and SoC platforms across industry leaders like AMD Xilinx, Intel, Microchip, etc.

Nice to Have

• Experience with SDR frameworks or platforms (USRP, RFSoC, GNU Radio) or custom SDR hardware
• Familiarity with algorithm modeling tools (MATLAB, Simulink, or Python/NumPy)
• Familiarity with RISC-V development toolchain
• Familiarity with rigorous software development processes including version control, change traceability, code coverage analysis, and CI/CD pipelines

Compensation

Hiring range: $148,000-$222,000 USD. Compensation determined based on experience, qualifications, and job-related factors. Relativity Space offers competitive salary and equity, generous PTO and sick leave, parental leave, and an annual learning and development stipend.