Hypersonics Defense Engineer

About the role

You will join a defense technology company working in the hardest flight regime there is: sustained flight above Mach 5, where the air itself changes chemistry and heating can destroy a vehicle in seconds. The hypersonics team designs vehicles and interceptors that survive extreme aerothermal environments, manage shock-boundary layer interactions, and stay controllable across the full trajectory. Your analyses decide whether a concept can actually fly, grounding propulsion, thermal protection, and trajectory trades in physics that independent reviewers can verify.

What you will achieve

• Run aerothermodynamic analyses that predict stagnation heating within 15 percent of wind tunnel or flight data for a representative vehicle.
• Size thermal protection systems for a hypersonic trajectory, trading ablative and reusable materials against mass and turnaround constraints.
• Build trajectory optimization models that maximize range or intercept geometry while respecting heating, load, and controllability limits.
• Evaluate scramjet propulsion concepts through cycle analysis, quantifying specific impulse and operability across the flight envelope.
• Deliver design review packages with quantified margins on heating, structures, and stability that survive independent technical review.
• Deliver coupled aerothermal-structural assessments that give the structures team heating inputs with quantified uncertainty bands.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• You bring 2 to 5 years of experience in hypersonics, high-speed aerodynamics, or reentry vehicle analysis.
• You have run CFD for supersonic or hypersonic flows and understand meshing, turbulence modeling, and chemistry effects.
• You grasp aerothermodynamics: shock layers, boundary layer transition, real gas effects, and convective versus radiative heating.
• You are familiar with thermal protection materials, including ablatives, carbon-carbon, and ceramic matrix composites.
• You code in MATLAB or Python for trajectory analysis, data reduction, and trade studies.
• You communicate heating and performance results clearly to structures, propulsion, and guidance teams.
• You have correlated CFD or engineering predictions with wind tunnel or flight test data, quantifying uncertainty and model error.

Nice-to-haves

• You have supported hypersonic wind tunnel testing or flight test data analysis.
• You bring experience with scramjet inlet, isolator, or combustor analysis.
• You understand plasma sheath effects on RF communication during hypersonic flight.
• You are eligible for a U.S. security clearance.
• You bring experience with ablation modeling or material response codes for thermal protection analysis.