Relativity Space is seeking an Embedded Software Engineer for its Interplanetary Sciences Program. You will build the storage platform software stack for a space-based data center, owning the complete stack from custom Linux kernel drivers to ZFS pool design to ensure data preservation through years of radiation exposure.
What You'll Do
- Own the complete storage platform software stack for a space-based data center: custom Linux kernel drivers, OpenZFS pool design, NFS data serving, and automated fault recovery.
- Design and implement custom Linux kernel drivers for NVMe fault recovery and GPIO overcurrent protection.
- Lead ZFS pool topology architectural decisions by building quantitative reliability models and validate through fault injection testing.
- Develop the integration layer between NVMe controller reset and ZFS.
- Rapidly prototype on commodity hardware, from first boot through sustained 10 Gbps writes with automated fault recovery.
What We're Looking For
- 3+ years writing Linux kernel code, actual driver development involving PCI/PCIe devices, block storage, or interrupt-driven hardware.
- Experience with storage systems: ZFS or other copy-on-write filesystems, RAID, NVMe internals, or high-throughput network storage (e.g., NFS).
- Depth in one or more: filesystem internals, block layer / device management, or storage protocol implementation.
- Strong working knowledge of OS internals: virtual memory, interrupt context constraints, synchronization primitives, and I/O stack behavior.
Nice to Have
- Hands-on experience at the driver hardware software boundary: DMA coherency, MMIO semantics, PCIe enumeration, and cache behavior.
- Strong working knowledge of data structures and systems reasoning for storage (Merkle trees, NVMe submission/completion queue ring buffers, hash tables, radix trees).
- Experience testing storage systems, including fault injection (PCIe/NVMe resets, error storms), low-level tracing (ftrace/perf/bpftrace), and crash dump analysis (kdump/vmcore).
- Experience designing software recovery around storage hardware fault cases.
- Familiarity with embedded Linux build systems (Yocto or Buildroot) and cross-compilation.
- Hardware lab comfort: serial consoles, logic analyzers, and willingness to debug PCIe enumeration failures on a prototype board.
Technical Stack
- Linux kernel
- OpenZFS
- NFS
- NVMe
- PCI/PCIe
- GPIO
- Yocto
- Buildroot
Team & Environment
Part of the Interplanetary Sciences Program.
Benefits & Compensation
- Compensation: $154,000—$211,000 USD + competitive equity.
- Generous PTO and sick leave policy
- Parental leave
- Annual learning and development stipend
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.
