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Salary: USD 180,000 - 200,000 / annual
Uber is launching AV Labs to accelerate the autonomous vehicle technology ecosystem. The company is building a high-velocity, multi-disciplinary team focused on unlocking real-world, long-tail driving data—the hardest problem in autonomous vehicles today. Autonomy is fundamentally a data race, and Uber has a competitive edge: it collects rare, real-world driving data at scale and capital efficiency unmatched by competitors.
As a Senior Thermal Engineer, you will own thermal design, validation, and troubleshooting for autonomous vehicle hardware end-to-end. This is a highly hands-on role working directly with sensors, compute systems, vehicle hardware, and environmental systems from prototype through production.
Core Responsibilities:
- Own end-to-end thermal design and validation for vehicle hardware, including compute units, power electronics, and sensor systems.
- Design practical thermal solutions using liquid cooling, conduction, convection, heat sinks, fans/blowers, heaters, insulation, and thermal interface materials.
- Design and develop liquid cooling systems, including coolant loops, cold plates, pumps, heat exchangers/radiators, reservoirs, valves, hoses, and vehicle integration.
- Build and instrument prototypes; perform bench, thermal chamber, and vehicle testing across hot/cold environmental conditions.
- Perform thermal and fluid calculations to size cooling components and evaluate system performance.
- Use thermal/CFD simulation where appropriate and correlate models against physical test data.
- Troubleshoot thermal and cooling-system issues directly on vehicles and hardware, identify root causes, and implement corrective actions.
- Work closely with mechanical, electrical, sensor, compute, vehicle integration, and operations teams.
- Drive designs from early prototype through validation builds and release in production.
Requirements:
- BS/MS in Mechanical Engineering or related engineering discipline.
- 5+ years of thermal engineering experience, preferably in automotive, autonomous vehicles, robotics, aerospace, or high-power electronics.
- Strong hands-on experience designing, building, and validating cooling systems.
- Demonstrated experience with liquid cooling.
- Strong hands-on experience building, instrumenting, and testing thermal systems.
- Strong understanding of heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and electronics thermal management.
- Experience with environmental chambers and vehicle-level hot/cold testing.
- Experience with CAD (Solidworks, NX, Catia, or equivalent) and mechanical design.
- Comfortable working directly with prototype hardware, test equipment, and vehicles.
- Demonstrated ability to take an ambiguous thermal problem from measurement → root cause → design → validation.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with thermal/CFD tools.
- Automotive coolant-loop or vehicle thermal-management experience.
- Familiarity with automotive validation, reliability testing, and production design processes.
