Senior GNC Performance Engineer

About the Team: 

The Integrated Performance team owns the holistic view of how Terran R comes together, ensuring that every system on the vehicle and ground is capable of achieving our ambitious objectives. The team works across the full launch system, from trajectory design and aerodynamics to reliability analysis and beyond, with direct influence on all parts of the product lifecycle, from conceptual design to post-flight data review. Beyond analysis, team members engage hands-on with hardware and operations, with the mission and authority to drive meaningful programmatic change. With a unique organizational structure, the integrated performance team spans multiple technical domains and embeds directly with partner teams to solve the hardest multi-disciplinary problems. The team operates with a rare scale: large enough to support complex development, yet small enough that individual contributors have meaningful impact.

About the Role:

• Closely collaborate with key design teams to integrate the latest design data into full simulations of customer missions
• Develop and leverage software tooling to optimize launch and orbital trajectories across key customer missions
• Lead interdisciplinary design trade analyses to inform critical decisions about the vehicle, mission trajectories, and ConOps
• Define and maintain high-level vehicle and trajectory design requirements to inform the overall design process
• Implement, maintain, and improve software tooling across a variety of languages, from core simulation capabilities to peripheral analysis utilities
• Establish and lead cross-functional collaboration with key teams across Vehicle Engineering

About You:

• An undergraduate or graduate degree (BS/MS/PhD) in Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, or a related field
• 2+ years of relevant full-time work experience with demonstrated ability to solve complex problems from first principles
• Direct experience on rocketry, space systems, or equally complex hardware systems
• Strong proficiency in high-level programming languages (e.g. Python, Julia, MATLAB) and setting up complex simulation processes
• Ability to complete projects with end-to-end ownership and a high degree of independence
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced and intense startup environment

Nice to haves but not required:  

• Familiarity with launch vehicle trajectory design and optimization
• Have previously been a leading contributor on complex multi-disciplinary engineering analysis projects
• Prior work in a startup environment
• Experience working with advanced software development practices such as Docker, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), and dependency management