Relativity Space is hiring a Staff Embedded Software Engineer for the Interplanetary Sciences Program. You will own the complete storage platform software stack for a space-based data center, designing and implementing custom Linux kernel drivers and storage systems to preserve mission data 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, shipping a platform that preserves up to a petabyte of mission data through years of radiation exposure.
- Design and implement custom Linux kernel drivers for NVMe fault recovery and GPIO overcurrent protection, working across PCI/PCIe, block layer, and interrupt subsystems to detect and recover from radiation-induced upsets without data loss.
- Lead the ZFS pool topology architectural decisions by building quantitative reliability models that balance upset probability, resilver risk, and capacity over a 6+ year mission, then validate through fault injection testing.
- Develop the integration layer between NVMe controller reset and ZFS, ensuring that a drive recovering from a transient fault re-enters the storage pool cleanly, bridging driver-level recovery with filesystem-level fault tolerance.
- Rapidly prototype on commodity hardware, from first boot through sustained 10 Gbps writes with automated fault recovery, de-risking the architecture before committing to the target platform, then carry the design through integration and launch.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years writing Linux kernel code, actual driver development involving PCI/PCIe devices, block storage, or interrupt-driven hardware, with meaningful time spent in kernel space.
- 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, whether that's storage firmware, autonomous vehicle data systems, large-scale distributed infrastructure, or embedded platforms.
- 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 alongside the electrical engineers.
Technical Stack
- Linux kernel, PCI/PCIe, NVMe, OpenZFS, NFS, GPIO, Yocto, Buildroot
Team & Environment
Part of the Interplanetary Sciences Program.
Benefits & Compensation
- Competitive salary and equity
- Generous PTO and sick leave policy
- Parental leave
- Annual learning and development stipend
- Compensation: $181,000—$248,500 USD + equity: Competitive equity
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.
