Senior Thermal & CFD Engineer (Contract-to-Hire)
3-4 Week & 20 hrs / wk (70-80 hrs total) Remote-First U.S. persons only
Occasional day-trips to our SoCal integration shop for fit-checks & test days
Who We Are We're a defense startup building a compact, high-energy electromechanical platform that solves some of the hardest problems in modern point protection. You'll join a small, multidisciplinary team moving from prototype to operational test on an accelerated schedule.
What You'll Do- Thermal-System Architecture - size, model, and detail-design the liquid jacket, purge-air ducts, and heat-sink stack for a 150k RPM motor
- Full-Stack CFD / FEA Ownership - build and run Ansys; close the loop with flash-temperature hand-calcs, transient thermo-structural stress, and rotor growth / balance checks.
- Motor & Power-Electronics Cooling - design a compact glycol loop (pump, HX, cartridge) plus quick-disconnects that survive MIL-STD-810H thermal shock and dust ingress.
- Material, Coating, and Lubrication Trade-offs - select copper alloys, AM HX cores, dry-film coatings, and purge-gas conditioning to manage tungsten-on-steel flash temps at Mach 4-6.
- Prototype-to-Test Execution - release CAD/BOM, stand up lab rigs, instrument with T-type TC, IR, and telemetry; verify model/bench ΔT 10 C.
- Qualification Path - draft and run MIL-STD-810H (thermal, altitude) and DO-160G (cooling flow) test plans; write data packs for investor / customer demo.
- Cross-Functional Integration - work daily with structures, bearings, controls, and manufacturing to turn simulations into field-ready hardware inside a single-pallet, 360 gimbal envelope.
What You Bring- B.S. or higher in Mechanical, Aerospace, or similar.
- 7+ years closing tough thermal problems on high-speed rotors, EV drive units, turbomachinery, or defense hardware.
- Expert-level Ansys ; solid with journal/Python automation.
- Track record from concept CFD/FEA prototype validated hardware under compressed timelines.
- Fluent in first-principles heat-transfer, flash-temperature, and rotor thermo-elastic calcs-comfortable proving numbers on a whiteboard.
- Hands-on-enjoys CAD iteration, sensor wiring, and late-night data wrangling with the test team.
Nice-to-Haves- Two-phase / evaporative or conformal AM heat-exchanger experience.
- MIL-STD-810 or RTCA DO-160 thermal qualification chops.
- Background in rotor dynamics or bearing thermo-elastic stability.
- Uses AI co-pilots (e.g., Gemini, Copilot) responsibly to accelerate meshing, optimization, and reporting.
Why This Gig Rocks- 60-day impact: Your work is the gate for live-fire demo
- Autonomy + focus: 20 hrs / week, results-driven, no corporate drag.
- Path to full-time: Nail this surge and step into Principal Thermal Engineer as we scale.
- Equity upside: Contract hourly plus grant potential upon conversion.