Thermal Systems Aerospace Engineer

About the role

You will join the thermal engineering team of an aerospace company responsible for keeping spacecraft and aircraft systems within their temperature limits. The team owns thermal design, analysis, and testing from concept through flight. This role matters because thermal is the silent killer of space missions: your radiators, heaters, and insulation decide whether electronics survive eclipse, batteries stay in range, and instruments hold calibration through every orbit. You will think in terms of energy balance across the entire vehicle, tracking every watt from its source to its ultimate rejection to space or the atmosphere. Your thermal models will grow to thousands of nodes, and your skill will lie in knowing which details matter and which can be simplified without corrupting the answers the program needs. You will design tests that validate the model rather than merely demonstrating survival, placing instrumentation to measure the specific parameters your correlations depend on. When model and test disagree, you will dig into contact conductances, surface properties, and environmental assumptions with the patience the problem demands, because thermal correlation is earned rather than assumed.

What you will achieve

• Deliver thermal designs keeping all components within limits across hot and cold design cases with margins above 5 C at CDR
• Cut thermal model correlation gaps to under 3 C through TVAC test planning and model updating against measured data
• Own spacecraft-level thermal balance: radiator sizing, MLI design, heater power budgets, and thermal interface agreements
• Drive thermal vacuum test campaigns: test predictions, instrumentation plans, and anomaly resolution with design teams
• Ship flight thermal models and operational heater setpoints used by mission operations for the life of the vehicle
• Reduce heater power consumption by optimizing thermostat setpoints and insulation design validated against correlated flight predictions

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 2 to 5 years of experience in spacecraft or aircraft thermal engineering roles
• Strong heat transfer fundamentals: conduction, radiation (view factors), and phase change applied to aerospace systems
• Proficiency with Thermal Desktop/SINDA/FLUINT or ESATAN for spacecraft thermal modeling
• Working knowledge of thermal control hardware: radiators, heat pipes, MLI, coatings (OSR, AZ93), heaters, and thermostats
• Experience with thermal vacuum testing: test design, instrumentation, and data correlation
• Ability to build thermal math models from CAD and manage model complexity for runtime
• Understanding of space thermal environments: solar, albedo, IR, and eclipse transients

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with cryogenic thermal systems or deployable radiators
• Knowledge of two-phase thermal control: loop heat pipes and mechanically pumped loops
• Familiarity with aerothermal heating for reentry or hypersonic vehicles
• Exposure to thermal design for optical payloads with tight stability requirements
• Experience with phase-change materials or variable emissivity devices