Senior Thermal Engineer

About the Company

Why hiring:

• Support the rapid innovation cycle and maintain performance and reliability of advanced defense technologies in complex, contested environments.
• Enable the rapid hardware development cycle by ensuring advanced defense systems perform reliably in demanding real-world environments.

About the Role

Title: Senior Thermal Engineer

Location: Costa Mesa, CA

Contract: 6 months, with possible extension or conversion

Start: Sooner than January

Employment type: Contract

End product:

• Own thermal design and analysis for unmanned air vehicles at conceptual, preliminary, and detailed design maturities, from conceptual design through ground testing and flight test analysis.
• Develop thermal system architectures and material selection strategies for vehicles operating in demanding flight environments.
• Deliver resilient, high-performance systems for complex, contested environments.
• Thermal design and analysis for integrated hardware products including drones, aircraft, missiles, and related flight systems.

Responsibilities

Tech / domain environment:

• Aerospace thermal engineering on rocket, aircraft, or missile programs, with 5+ years of experience.
• CFD using STAR-CCM+ or ANSYS Fluent, and/or FEA thermal solvers.
• CAD using SolidWorks or Siemens NX.
• Work in demanding flight environments, including high-temperature environments.
• Apply thermal analysis to high-temperature environments.
• High-power, tightly integrated products where thermal architecture, analysis, testing, and cross-functional design decisions affect performance, reliability, and mission success.
• Rugged environments and demanding flight envelopes, including hot, cold, transient, and mission-specific thermal conditions.

Job duties:

• Perform thermal analysis of flight vehicles using CFD, FEA, and engineering methods.
• Plan, execute, and analyze ground tests in specialized thermal test facilities.
• Plan and execute flight tests and analyze post-flight thermal data.
• Collaborate with aerodynamics, structures, electrical, and systems engineers on integrated solutions.
• Present thermal status at formal internal and customer reviews.
• Prepare specifications, test procedures, and technical reports.
• Model material response under combined thermal and mechanical loads.
• Perform transient thermal analysis for time-varying mission profiles.
• Use first principles and MATLAB/Python models to inform design decisions.
• Use first-principles judgment to select the appropriate analysis level, from hand calculations and spreadsheets to MATLAB/Python models, FEA, and CFD.
• Document power dissipation, operating modes, thermal constraints, and design tradeoffs with electrical, mechanical, aerospace, software, and systems engineers.
• Build and maintain thermal FEA/CFD models to predict system performance, establish design limits, and define red/yellow operating thresholds for test and field use.
• Define and execute prototype builds and thermal tests, including CAD support, sensor selection, DAQ setup, data post-processing, and results documentation.
• Present thermal risks, tradeoffs, timelines, and recommendations in internal design reviews and customer-facing technical reviews.
• Develop internal tools, workflows, or analysis methods that improve the speed, consistency, and quality of thermal decision-making.
• Support failure reviews and root-cause investigations using test data, thermal analysis, and first-principles reasoning.

Qualifications

• MS or higher in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or Applied Physics, focused on heat transfer and fluid dynamics.

Required Skills

Must haves:

• MS or higher in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or Applied Physics, focused on heat transfer and fluid dynamics.
• 5+ years of aerospace thermal engineering experience on rocket, aircraft, or missile programs.
• Thermal analysis experience in high-speed flight regimes.
• Thermal analysis using CFD (STAR-CCM+, ANSYS Fluent) and/or FEA thermal solvers.
• Experience with thermal-structural coupling.
• Ground testing experience with thermal instrumentation and data acquisition.
• Programming skills in MATLAB, Python, or similar for tool development.
• Experience preparing formal documentation.
• CAD experience with SolidWorks or Siemens NX.
• Ability to obtain and hold a U.S. Top Secret security clearance.
• U.S. citizenship.
• In-depth understanding of heat transfer and fluid dynamics.
• Pass at least 3 of 4 thermal prescreen questions cleanly before advancing to the engineering technical round; include candidate answers with submissions.
• Thoroughly vet candidates against the provided prescreen questions and include their answers in the submission.
• Demonstrate passion for defending the United States and its allies.
• Strong first-principles understanding of heat transfer and fluid dynamics, including conduction, convection, radiation, fluid flow, and transient thermal behavior.
• Experience using thermal analysis, modeling, simulation, and/or physical test data to drive design decisions for passive or active thermal management systems.
• Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly across engineering, program, and customer stakeholders.

Preferred Skills

Nice to haves:

• Experience with material response modeling in extreme thermal environments.
• Knowledge of material degradation and surface phenomena under demanding conditions.
• Experience with specialized thermal ground test facilities.
• Experience with chemical kinetics and finite-rate chemistry modeling.
• Flight test experience, including instrumentation design and post-flight analysis.
• Experience with thermal-structural analysis codes: NASTRAN, Abaqus, or ANSYS Mechanical.
• Material characterization at elevated temperatures.
• Experience manufacturing and assembling thermal systems.
• Active U.S. security clearance.
• Secret clearance enables full contribution on classified work.
• Experience with thermal-structural analysis codes including NASTRAN, Abaqus, and ANSYS Mechanical.
• Experience designing thermal hardware such as heat sinks, cold plates, fans, pumps, heat exchangers, thermal interface materials, liquid cooling systems, or air-cooling systems.
• Experience planning or executing thermal tests, including sensor selection, data acquisition, data post-processing, and correlation of test results to analysis.
• Experience supporting formal design reviews, customer reviews, flight test