Senior Thermal Engineer

The role

You will own thermal design and analysis for advanced defense hardware including drones, aircraft, and missiles. You will use first-principles engineering, modeling, and testing to define thermal architectures and ensure product reliability in demanding environments.

What you will do

• Own thermal design and analysis for integrated hardware products.
• Use first-principles engineering judgment for design decisions using hand calculations, MATLAB/Python, FEA, and CFD.
• Define thermal architectures for rugged environments and demanding flight envelopes.
• Partner with electrical, mechanical, aerospace, software, and systems engineers.
• Build and maintain thermal FEA/CFD models to predict system performance.
• Define and execute prototype builds and thermal tests.
• Present thermal status, risks, and recommendations in design and customer reviews.
• Develop internal tools, workflows, or analysis methods.
• Support failure reviews and root-cause investigations.

Required qualifications

• MS or PhD in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Applied Physics, or a related field with a focus on heat transfer, fluid dynamics, thermal sciences, or thermal systems.
• 5+ years of experience designing, analyzing, or validating thermal systems for integrated hardware products.
• Strong first-principles understanding of heat transfer and fluid dynamics, including conduction, convection, radiation, fluid flow, and transient thermal behavior.
• Experience supporting thermal design for aerospace, aircraft, rocket, missile, UAV, defense, or other high-performance hardware systems.
• Experience using thermal analysis, modeling, simulation, and/or physical test data to drive design decisions for passive or active thermal management systems.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Top Secret security clearance.

Nice to have

• Experience with thermal analysis tools such as STAR-CCM+, ANSYS, Icepak, Flotherm, or comparable FEA / CFD platforms.
• Experience using MATLAB, Python, spreadsheets, or similar tools for first-order thermal modeling, transient analysis, or engineering trade studies.
• 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 with SolidWorks, Siemens NX, or comparable CAD tools.
• 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.
• Strong motivation to support Anduril’s mission of defending the United States and allied partners.

Benefits

• Comprehensive, competitive benefits package available at little to no cost to employees.

Before you apply

• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Top Secret security clearance.
• Consent to pre-employment risk, integrity, and due diligence screening.

About the company

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company with a mission to transform U.S. and allied military capabilities with advanced technology. Their family of systems is powered by Lattice OS, an AI-powered operating system.