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Salary: USD 129,000 - 171,000 / annual
Anduril Industries is seeking a Thermal Engineer to own the thermal management and environmental control systems (ECS) of air vehicles and advanced defense platforms. You will apply deep expertise in heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and thermal systems to keep avionics, payloads, power, and propulsion subsystems within operational limits across the full mission envelope, from hot-day ground operations to high-altitude flight.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own the thermal design and analysis of vehicle thermal management and ECS—air-cycle, ram-air, bleed-air, and liquid cooling loops—from component and cold plate level through full vehicle integration.
- Use first principles to determine the appropriate level of analysis, running hand calculations, spreadsheets, and MATLAB/Python first-order models before detailed design.
- Define thermal management architecture and heat-sink strategy, including ram-air and air-cycle cooling, vapor-cycle systems, liquid coolant loops, fuel as a heat sink, and thermal energy storage.
- Size and rate heat exchangers, cold plates, pumps, fans, and valves; evaluate vendor hardware against system requirements.
- Develop steady-state and transient system models of coolant, fuel, hydraulic, and lubrication circuits using tools such as Simcenter Amesim, Simscape, or GT-SUITE to predict performance across ground, climb, cruise, and off-nominal conditions.
- Collaborate with avionics, propulsion, power, structures, and systems engineers to characterize heat loads and define thermal requirements and interfaces across operating and failure modes.
- Conduct thermal architecture trade studies balancing performance, weight, power draw, reliability, and cost against vehicle-level impact.
- Own thermal system models, correlate them to test and flight data, and establish red/yellow limits for test and operation.
- Lead prototype builds, ground testing, and validation of thermal management and ECS designs, including CAD, sensor and DAQ selection, and data post-processing.
- Present thermal status and tradeoffs at internal and customer reviews with clear visibility into timelines and technical status.
- Develop internal tools to improve analysis effectiveness and efficiency.
- Support failure reviews and root-cause analysis with test data and thermal analysis.
The Thermal Engineering team's work is essential to support rapid innovation cycles and maintain performance and reliability of advanced defense technologies. You will own the full development life cycle from conceptual design through prototyping, ground and flight testing, and operational deployment.
REQUIREMENTS:
- MS or PhD in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Applied Physics, or related field with focus on heat transfer, fluid dynamics, thermal sciences, or thermal systems
- Strong first-principles understanding of heat transfer and fluid dynamics, including conduction, convection, radiation, fluid flow, and transient thermal behavior
- Experience using thermal analysis, modeling, simulation, and/or physical test data to drive design decisions for passive or active thermal management systems
- Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly across engineering, program, and customer stakeholders
- Ability to obtain and hold a U.S. Top Secret security clearance
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience with thermal system modeling software such as Simcenter Amesim, Simscape, or GT-SUITE
- Experience using MATLAB, Python, spreadsheets, or similar tools for first-order thermal modeling, transient analysis, or engineering trade studies
- CAD experience with Siemens NX, SolidWorks, or comparable tools
- Experience with thermal management, environmental control systems (ECS), air-conditioning, bleed-air, or ram-air systems
- Experience with analysis and modeling of hydraulic, fuel, coolant, or lubrication circuits
- Experience with heat exchanger sizing and rating
