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Salary: USD 175,000 - 225,000 / annual
Turion Space is building critical infrastructure for the space economy through vertically integrated hardware and software. DROID is their line of space vehicles; Starfire is their software suite for simulation, modeling, planning, and operations.
As Principal Software Engineer for Vehicle Analysis, you will embed with the thermal team to transform manual thermal analysis into fully automated pipelines. The role focuses on eliminating hand-built models, manual solve babysitting, and copy-paste reporting workflows.
Key responsibilities include:
- Parametric thermal model generation: Build systems that generate thermal models directly from CAD geometry and materials/interface databases, so design changes automatically propagate without rework.
- Case matrix automation: Generate and manage hot/cold case matrices across orbits, attitudes, seasons, beta angles, and operating modes using design of experiments and sampling for trade studies.
- Cloud and HPC orchestration: Manage large-scale batch solve campaigns with job scheduling, retries, caching, and cost tracking.
- Tool automation: Automate commercial thermal tools (Thermal Desktop, SINDA via OpenTD, Ansys, STK) through their APIs and extend with in-house solvers.
- Post-processing automation: Produce margin tables, trend plots, worst-case rollups, and analysis reports ready for design review.
- Test correlation: Ingest thermal vacuum and thermal balance test data, automate model correlation, and track quality over time.
- Fleet monitoring: Compare on-orbit telemetry to predictions, flag divergence, and feed insights back into model libraries.
- Performance optimization: Build surrogate and reduced-order models for near-instant thermal feedback during early design trades.
- Configuration management: Version control thermal models, properties, and case definitions with traceability to vehicle configurations.
Required: Bachelor's in engineering, computer science, physics, or related field. 10+ years software engineering with demonstrated technical leadership. Expert Python for scientific computing (numpy ecosystem). Hands-on experience automating commercial thermal/CAE tools via API. Working knowledge of spacecraft thermal analysis (conduction, radiation networks, view factors, orbital environments, thermal margins). Experience orchestrating compute-heavy workloads on HPC or cloud batch systems.
Preferred: Thermal vacuum/balance test correlation, radiation modeling, surrogate/reduced-order modeling, prior spacecraft/launch/automotive experience.
