Ilya Kelner

Ilya Kelner is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Red Barn Robotics. Founded in June 2024, the five-person company develops autonomous weed-killing robots for organic farms and is an active participant in the Y Combinator Winter 2025 batch. Previously, he served as the Flight Software Lead at Relativity Space from July 2022 to March 2024. In this role, he built triple-redundant fault-tolerant flight computer architectures, Dockerized software deployments, and complex hardware-in-the-loop testing pipelines for orbital launch vehicles. Earlier in his career, he engineered software for autonomous cars at Nvidia, contributed to the Starlink satellite network at SpaceX, and worked as an early employee at two other early-stage technology startups. His current focus remains centered on designing mission-critical flight software, fault-tolerant architectures, and autonomous systems for the aerospace, robotics, and agriculture technology sectors.