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Isar Aerospace, a New Space company building modern launch solutions for small and medium-sized satellites, is seeking a Senior Engine Cycle Engineer to own the engine cycle and top-level technical architecture of a pump-fed liquid rocket engine.
In this role, you will translate mission and vehicle needs into an integrated engine design, establish key performance trades, and ensure every major subsystem converges on a coherent, testable, and manufacturable solution. You will be the technical decision driver for cross-functional design issues and report to Propulsion leadership.
Key Responsibilities:
- Build, maintain, and validate engine cycle models across nominal, throttled, and off-nominal operating conditions, including startup and shutdown transients
- Lead cycle trade studies and sensitivity analyses to optimize performance and identify design drivers, constraints, and technical risks
- Perform top-level engine sizing and define principal operating points and component interface conditions
- Drive architecture and design tradeoffs across combustion devices, turbomachinery, valves, feed systems, ignition, controls, structures, thermal management, and engine layout
- Own top-level engine requirements, assumptions, interface definitions, and technical budgets
- Act as the technical decision driver for cross-functional design issues; keep decisions documented, traceable, and backed by analysis and test evidence
- Own the technical development roadmap and timeline: guide design iterations, prioritize maturation activities, and define analyses, breadboards, and tests that retire the highest risks
- Coordinate technical reviews and provide clear recommendations to Propulsion leadership and programme/vehicle teams
Requirements:
- MSc in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, or comparable technical discipline, or equivalent professional experience
- Several years in liquid rocket engine development with real responsibility for engine cycle analysis, engine architecture, or propulsion system integration
- Hands-on experience with high-pressure, pump-fed liquid rocket engine cycles: designing, analyzing, developing, or testing them
- Excellent understanding of engine cycles, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and turbomachinery power balance
- Steady-state cycle modeling, top-level engine sizing, and performance prediction
- Experience planning and coordinating multidisciplinary engine development or test campaigns and driving a technical roadmap to agreed timelines
- Proficiency in Python, MATLAB, or comparable programming language
- Strong technical ownership and systems thinking; confidence to decide with incomplete information
- Fluent in English
- Willingness to travel occasionally for test and launch operations
Bonus Skills:
- Experience with transient cycle modeling (startup, shutdown, throttling, off-nominal conditions)
- Experience taking an engine design from cycle definition and system-level trades into hardware and test
- Experience analyzing engine control, operability, stability, or failure cases
- Breadth across valves, feed systems, ignition, controls, structures, and thermal management to arbitrate tradeoffs between disciplines
- Experience correlating models against hot-fire test data
