eVTOL Thermal Management Engineer
The job description
Tech stack. liquid cooling loops, cold plate design, heat exchangers, thermal CFD, battery and inverter cooling, two-phase cooling, thermal modeling, environmental testing
About the role
You will join an eVTOL aircraft company to own the thermal system that keeps batteries, motors, inverters, and avionics inside their operating limits. Electric aircraft concentrate enormous heat rejection into short hover and climb phases, and this team designs the cooling loops, cold plates, and heat exchangers that handle it. Your work determines hot-day performance, turnaround time between flights, and component life, and thermal limits will gate the flight envelope if you get them wrong. You will work across the battery, propulsion, and avionics teams, since every heat source on the aircraft eventually becomes your problem, and your thermal models will gate dispatch decisions on hot days.
What you will achieve
- Architect the vehicle thermal management system, sizing pumps, cold plates, and heat exchangers for worst-case hot-day hover with margin to spare.
- Eliminate thermal hotspots in the battery pack and inverter installations through design changes validated by test, not just by analysis.
- Cut thermal system weight and power draw by 15 percent through loop consolidation and component selection, without giving up hot-day capability.
- Correlate thermal models with environmental chamber and flight test data, driving model error down until predictions guide design decisions confidently.
- Deliver the thermal test evidence, from component rigs to full vehicle hot-day testing, that supports the certification compliance package. Correlated models predict temperatures within agreed tolerances, giving the program confidence to clear hot-day operations.
What you will bring
Must-haves
- 2 to 5 years designing thermal management systems for batteries, power electronics, or electric drivetrains with tested hardware behind you.
- Strong thermal modeling skills, including CFD for liquid cooling loops and conjugate heat transfer in complex assemblies.
- Experience with cold plate, heat exchanger, and pump selection for weight-sensitive applications with tight packaging.
- Understanding of lithium-ion cell thermal behavior and the heat release characteristics of thermal runaway events.
- Hands-on testing experience: thermal chambers, flow loops, and instrumented test articles you built and ran.
- Degree in mechanical engineering or equivalent thermal sciences depth.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience with two-phase cooling or refrigerant-based systems for aircraft applications.
- Background in de-icing or environmental control systems for aviation.
- Familiarity with DO-160 environmental qualification for thermal hardware.
- Knowledge of phase-change materials for transient thermal buffering.
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