Staff Thermal Systems Integration Engineer

The role

The Staff Thermal Systems Integration Engineer will own thermal management across the entire robot platform. This includes system-level thermal architecture, modeling, simulation, and integration with mechanical design and control systems.

What you will do

• Develop system-level thermal requirements and decompose to subsystems and components.
• Own thermal management of the entire robot platform including cooling devices, thermal paths, and heat dissipation strategies.
• Partner with Hardware sub-teams from design review and release to ensure thermal requirements are met.
• Create detailed thermal simulations to validate designs.
• Lead thermal verification across diverse operating environments against reliability and uptime targets.
• Collaborate with Control Engineers to develop thermal management algorithms, derating, and shutdown strategies.
• Work with Safety Engineers to integrate thermal constraints into system safety analyses.
• Validate subsystem and robot-level thermal performance.
• Document thermal specifications, analyses, simulation results, and verification test plans.
• Provide technical guidance on thermal design principles and best practices.

Required qualifications

• At least 10 years of related experience of thermal systems analysis, including heat transfer principles, thermal modeling, and cooling device design and selection.
• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, or closely related engineering discipline.
• Hands-on experience with thermal simulation tools for simulating heat loading and validating the impact of cooling devices and thermal management strategies.
• Strong systems-thinking: ability to reason across mechanical, electrical, and control layers to identify thermal constraints and optimize integrated thermal solutions.
• Experience decomposing system-level thermal requirements into component and subsystem specifications.
• Proven ability to work cross-functionally with Hardware, Controls, Safety, and Product teams.
• Strong troubleshooting and root-cause analysis instincts for thermal issues.
• Excellent communication skills.

Nice to have

• Experience with mainstream CFD tools (ANSYS Fluent, COMSOL, OpenFOAM, or similar) and advanced thermal simulation techniques.
• Proficiency in MATLAB / Simulink for thermal modeling, control algorithm development, or co-simulation environments.
• Experience with Python for thermal data analysis, automation, or custom tooling.
• Exposure to functional safety standards (ISO 26262, IEC 61508) and regulated product development.
• Experience with requirements management and traceability tooling (Flow, DOORS, Jama, Polarion, or similar).
• Background in robotics, embedded systems, or high-performance hardware platforms.
• Prior experience supporting products in the field and turning field-observed thermal issues into durable engineering improvements.

About the company

Rhoda AI is building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. They own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models.