Hypersonics Engineer

About the role

You will join the hypersonics team of an aerospace or defense company developing vehicles that fly above Mach 5. The team owns aerothermal design, high-temperature structures, and flight performance for some of the most extreme engineering environments ever attempted. This role matters because hypersonic flight punishes every approximation: your predictions of heating, boundary layer transition, and material response decide whether the vehicle survives its mission or fails in seconds. You will work in one of the most demanding regimes in aerospace, where air becomes plasma, materials approach their limits, and the facilities that replicate flight conditions are rare and precious. Your analyses will grapple with coupled physics that defeat simple models: reacting flows, ablation, communications blackout, and structural response to extreme heating, all interacting at once. You will be judicious about ground testing, designing experiments that isolate the critical phenomena within what arc jets and shock tunnels can actually reproduce. Your career will be built within the small community doing this work, and your reputation for honest assessment of what is known versus assumed will be your most valuable asset.

What you will achieve

• Deliver aerothermal designs predicting surface heating within 15 percent of high-enthalpy test data across the trajectory
• Cut design uncertainty by 25 percent through coupled CFD, material response, and trajectory analysis with documented assumptions
• Own boundary layer transition assessments and their impact on heating, drag, and control effectiveness
• Drive high-temperature material selection (C/C, UHTC, ablatives) with test-validated performance in relevant environments
• Ship flight predictions and instrumentation plans that capture the data needed to validate models on every test flight
• Reduce thermal protection system mass by improving aerothermal prediction accuracy through validated coupled analyses

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 2 to 5 years of experience in hypersonics, high-speed aerodynamics, or aerothermal engineering roles
• Deep understanding of hypersonic flow physics: shocks, real gas effects, dissociation, and boundary layer transition
• Proficiency with hypersonic CFD tools (FUN3D, US3D, LAURA, or DPLR) including thermochemical nonequilibrium modeling
• Working knowledge of aerothermal heating methods: Fay-Riddell, reference enthalpy, and coupled fluid-material approaches
• Familiarity with high-temperature materials: carbon-carbon, ultra-high-temperature ceramics, and ablative TPS
• Experience with high-enthalpy ground testing: shock tunnels, arc jets, and their limitations
• Honest uncertainty quantification: you know what models cannot predict and say so

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with scramjet or combined-cycle propulsion integration
• Knowledge of plasma blackout and communications through ionized flow
• Exposure to flight test data from hypersonic vehicles
• Understanding of guidance challenges at hypersonic speeds
• Experience with arc jet or shock tunnel test design and data interpretation