Pros
I joined Relativity almost a year ago. Admittedly, I was skeptical of the leadership and company itself, but decided to take an interview to see what the company was all about. Most startups and “new space” companies all say the right thing, especially in an interview. They want to empower engineers to solve hard problems, they value the employees and with that want to avoid burn out of the staff. After working on several programs with poor leaders where schedule was king even at the expense of the product, I began to lose faith that startups and the space industry can be as fun and challenging as they were often made out to be… until I joined Relativity. Relativity’s co-founders have been incredibly intentional in the leadership they hire. The leaders aren’t just experienced, but they all possess great leadership qualities. As an individual contributor, I do not feel uncomfortable going to any leader or manager and bringing up an issue or concern- that in itself is significant. Tim Ellis, the CEO, often says that we should be leading through inspiration, not fear. I am happy to say in my experience Relativity has and continues to do exactly that. Each engineer owns an incredible amount of responsibility and management does a great job at reminding them how their scope of work helps support the company vision in both the near term and long-term. The engineers are given resources and support when needed, and there is a cool dynamic of both the launch vehicle and “factory of the future” programs running in parallel and both sides of the company coming together and sharing different perspectives to tackle various challenges. The other engineers I work with are all extremely bright and experienced, but also very humble. Every engineer has likely worked on an exciting program and is a domain expert in some fashion, and I can absolutely say I get to learn something new every day as a result.
Cons
Based on my summary of the “Pros”, there are very few negatives I can think of. As a somewhat early stage start up office life can present unique challenges, but I think those are endearing qualities of any startup and part of the fun. A natural side-effect of being an aerospace companies is the lack of diversity, so I would ask them to continue to push for a more diverse workplace. In that, I mean diversity of both the employees and the employee's diversity of experience. Relativity is a very open and progressive company, and with that has done more than many other companies in that they acknowledge the issue and openly discuss ways to address diversity in the hiring process.