Staff Software Engineer, Agentic Infrastructure

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:

Dark Matter Lab is a research group within Relativity Space focused on advanced aerospace systems, agentic engineering, and technologies outside the conventional roadmap. We build the infrastructure needed to turn new ideas into engineering capabilities people can actually depend on.

About the Role:

We run a stack of interconnected agentic systems — SybilClaw, yapCAD, Mechatron, Multigraph, local LLM inference, an inter-agent message bus, parametric CAD pipelines, a print farm, and the infrastructure connecting it all. We need an engineer who can own and evolve these systems as they move from prototypes into production engineering infrastructure.

This role is for someone who has deployed an agentic harness (OpenClaw, Hermes, SybilClaw, or something comparable) in a real work environment. You understand what it takes to make these systems reliable when engineers depend on them every day. You’ll learn the stack, improve it, and work with forward-deployed engineers to package portions of it for deployment with internal and external customers.

• Own the reliability of our agentic infrastructure: agents, sessions, model routing, context pipelines, inter-agent communication, and supporting services
• Build and maintain infrastructure where good off-the-shelf solutions don't yet exist
• Deploy and operate local LLM inference across Mac Studio and GPU hardware
• Manage Linux/macOS systems, Proxmox VMs and containers, storage, backups, and recovery
• Maintain multi-site networking including L3 routing, VLANs, DNS, firewalls, and connectivity
• Build CLIs, dashboards, automation, and internal tools that make engineers faster
• Improve observability, debugging, and automated failure recovery
• Contribute upstream to open-source projects we rely on
• Help design practical security around local compute, data handling, and access controls
• Package and deploy portions of the stack into internal and customer environments
• Work directly with engineers to understand what they need and turn recurring problems into better infrastructure

About You:

• 7+ years of experience building and operating complex software and compute infrastructure, with hands-on work across hardware, operating systems, networking, and automation
• Experience deploying an agentic harness such as OpenClaw, Hermes, SybilClaw, or a comparable system in a real work environment
• Strong Linux and macOS systems experience, including debugging services, processes, storage, permissions, and networking
• Experience operating physical infrastructure, VMs, or containers in production
• Strong networking fundamentals including routing, VLANs, DNS, and firewalls
• Ability to build software, scripts, CLIs, and integrations when existing tools aren't sufficient
• Meaningful experience contributing to or maintaining open-source software
• Strong judgment around reliability, security, performance, and simplicity

Nice to haves but not required:

• Experience with ITAR-regulated, air-gapped, export-controlled, or similarly constrained environments
• Experience operating local LLM inference with Ollama, MLX, vLLM, llama.cpp, or similar
• Experience with model routing, context management, tool execution, agent state, or multi-agent systems
• Experience building internal developer infrastructure used daily by other engineers
• Experience deploying systems into customer or forward-deployed environments
• A GitHub, Gitea, or other body of work where we can see what you've built

This role requires in-office presence at least three days per week, with flexibility to work remotely when the work allows. Much of this infrastructure is physical, local-first, and best built alongside the engineers using it.

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:

$181,000—$271,000 USD

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.

If you need a reasonable accommodation, please contact us at accommodations@relativityspace.com.

Please note: Relativity Space does not accept unsolicited resumes, candidate profiles, or referrals from recruitment agencies or search firms. Any unsolicited submission - via email, our website, social media, or directly to an employee - will be deemed the property of Relativity Space, and no fee will be owed absent a current, fully executed agreement with Talent Acquisition that specifically authorizes submissions for the applicable role.