Senior Thermal Engineer

Title: Senior Thermal Engineer Headcount: 3-4 positions Location: Costa Mesa, CA Contract: 6 months, with possible extension or conversion Start: Sooner than January Employment type: Contract 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, qualification testing, or fielded hardware. - Experience developing reusable analysis tools, automation workflows, reduced-order models, or other methods that improve analysis speed and consistency. Disqualifiers: - Candidates who cannot pass at least 3 of the 4 thermal prescreen questions. - Candidates without U.S. citizenship. - Candidates who pass 2 or fewer of the 4 prescreen questions.