Director, Build Quality Engineering

Relativity Space • Long Beach, CA

6h

About The Position

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:
The Quality team is focused on embedding quality into every part of the design and production process for Terran R. Not just inspecting at the end but influencing how things are built from the start. The team embeds themselves directly within design, manufacturing, test, and launch teams to stay close to the hardware, understand constraints, and proactively shape decisions. As we move beyond initial development into production and then scaled operations, now is the time to put the right processes, controls, and inspections in place without slowing down progress. The team plays a key role in balancing risk, driving a culture of ownership, and ensuring that speed doesn’t come at the cost of reliability. Success here means building a quality system that scales with the Terran R program and Relativity as a whole.
About the Role:
Define the overarching reliability vision and strategy, aligning build-quality objectives with broader business outcomes and product roadmaps
Design the organizational structure, talent pipeline, and succession strategy for Build Reliability as the company scales, fostering ownership, technical rigor, and data-driven decision-making.
Manage complex failure analysis using Fault Tree process for critical manufacturing and field failures, ensuring long-term corrective and preventive actions (CAPA) are validated to prevent recurrence.
Integrate Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and predictive modeling into early-stage designs to identify risks before production begins.
Partner with NPI (New Product Introduction), Supply Chain, and Operations to resolve reliability issues and influence supplier quality.
Define and own the reliability KPI framework such as Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), Escapes to next operations and/or first-pass yield to provide actionable insights to executive leadership.
Oversee rigorous qualification testing, including Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) and environmental stress screening, to validate product lifespan and reliability targets.
Own major risk escalation and resolution as final accountability and trade-off authority, guiding disciplined problem solving (e.g., 8D) and ensuring rapid recovery on quality or capacity issues.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering (Mechanical, Aerospace, Industrial, or a related technical field)
• 10+ years of experience in Supplier Industrialization, Supplier Development, or Manufacturing Engineering, ideally within the aerospace or a high-reliability/safety-critical industry with demonstrated ownership of complex, cross-functional systems at scale
• 5+ years of direct people management experience, including coaching, mentorship, and performance management of an engineering team
• Proven ability to influence senior leaders and peers across Engineering, Operations, and Supply Chain without direct authority
• Expert knowledge of quality systems (AS9100/ISO 9001) and core quality tools (APQP, PPAP, FAIRs, PFMEA, Control Plans), with a proven ability to influence the implementation and compliance of key quality initiatives.
• Demonstrated capability to build processes from the ground up and successfully deploy them across diverse teams.
• Willingness to travel up to 50% of the work week when needed.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in Engineering (Mechanical, Aerospace, Industrial, or a related technical field).
• Professional certification such as Six Sigma Black Belt, ASQ Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence (CMQ/OE), or PMP.
• Familiarity with high-volume inspection methods and data-driven acceptance methods.
• Strong knowledge of enterprise applications (i.e., PLM, ERP, MES) and proficient in data analysis.
• Comfortable operating in high ambiguity, setting direction where precedent or data is incomplete.

Responsibilities

• Define the overarching reliability vision and strategy, aligning build-quality objectives with broader business outcomes and product roadmaps
• Design the organizational structure, talent pipeline, and succession strategy for Build Reliability as the company scales, fostering ownership, technical rigor, and data-driven decision-making.
• Manage complex failure analysis using Fault Tree process for critical manufacturing and field failures, ensuring long-term corrective and preventive actions (CAPA) are validated to prevent recurrence.
• Integrate Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and predictive modeling into early-stage designs to identify risks before production begins.
• Partner with NPI (New Product Introduction), Supply Chain, and Operations to resolve reliability issues and influence supplier quality.
• Define and own the reliability KPI framework such as Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), Escapes to next operations and/or first-pass yield to provide actionable insights to executive leadership.
• Oversee rigorous qualification testing, including Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) and environmental stress screening, to validate product lifespan and reliability targets.
• Own major risk escalation and resolution as final accountability and trade-off authority, guiding disciplined problem solving (e.g., 8D) and ensuring rapid recovery on quality or capacity issues.

Benefits

• Relativity Space offers competitive salary and equity, a generous PTO and sick leave policy, parental leave, an annual learning and development stipend, and more!

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director