Staff Materials & Process Engineer

About the Team:
Awerx is a team within Relativity Space building agentic design tools for aerospace. The team focuses on agentic mechanical engineering and advanced manufacturing: systems that reason about geometry, materials, and process alongside the engineers who use them. The goal is design tools that produce parts that are not just analyzable, but buildable, qualifiable, and right the first time. You’ll work where software meets hardware, turning hard-won shop-floor knowledge into tools that change how aerospace hardware gets designed and built.

This role requires on-site presence at least three days per week, with flexibility to work remotely when the work allows. Much of the work is hands-on and best done alongside the engineers and hardware it supports.

About the Role:
As a Staff Materials and Process Engineer, you’ll bring deep metallurgical and manufacturing-process expertise into the Awerx design-for-manufacturing (DFM) systems. You’ll turn what you know about how metals solidify, deform, crack, and machine into the rules, models, and constraints our agents use to design and plan aerospace hardware. The focus is hybrid manufacturing. That means multi-additive routes that combine processes such as sintered metal powder and wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM), and additive-plus-subtractive workflows that pair deposition with CNC finishing. Few tools reason well about these process chains today. You’ll help define how ours should, then build coupons and parts to prove it.

• Encode metallurgy and process knowledge into Awerx DFM systems as design rules, process windows, material models, and manufacturability checks, including how agents reason about multi-additive builds, process interfaces, and deposition-to-machining handoffs
• Develop process guidance for directed energy deposition (WAAM and other DED), CNC machining, and their combination, covering near-net-shape allowances, fixturing, distortion, and inspection access
• Characterize how process route drives microstructure, residual stress, defects, and properties in nickel superalloys, copper alloys, aluminum, and titanium, and build the materials and process datasets the agents depend on, with clear provenance and uncertainty
• Plan and run validation programs hands-on in lab and shop environments, including coupons, test articles, heat treatment, NDE, metallography, and mechanical testing, to confirm or correct what the tools predict
• Lead materials and process qualification of hybrid-manufactured hardware, including qualification plans, process controls, and statistically based design allowables in line with NAVSEA requirements and MMPDS methodology
• Collaborate with software engineers, designers, Relativity’s production, materials, and quality teams, and outside suppliers to specify and review tool features, evaluate agent-generated designs and process plans, and turn tacit shop knowledge and recurring failure modes into clear, explicit constraints

About You:

• Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science, Metallurgy, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field
• 10+ years of materials and process engineering experience on aerospace or other high-reliability metal hardware
• Expertise in physical metallurgy across nickel superalloys, copper alloys, aluminum, and titanium, including solidification, phase transformations, heat treatment, and defect formation
• Hands-on experience developing or qualifying directed energy deposition processes (WAAM, laser DED, or electron-beam DED) and integrating them with CNC machining
• Experience designing and running test programs (coupons, metallography, NDE, mechanical testing) and generating statistically based design allowables (A- and B-basis) to NAVSEA, MMPDS, or comparable requirements
• Proficiency in Python or a similar language for data analysis and scripting

Nice to haves but not required:

• PhD in Materials Science, Metallurgy, or a related field
• Experience with sintered-powder routes (binder jet, metal injection molding, press-and-sinter) or laser powder bed fusion, including multi-material or bimetallic interfaces such as copper-to-superalloy transitions
• Experience with ICME, CALPHAD, or thermo-mechanical process simulation for additive manufacturing, or with CAM and deposition path planning
• Experience qualifying additive parts for flight under NASA-STD-6030 or comparable standards, or applying machine learning to materials or process data