Staff Aerothermal CFD Methods Engineer Verified today

Advanced Reentry Technologies

Inversion is an aerospace and defense company pioneering advanced reentry technology. The company designs and manufactures highly maneuverable reentry spacecraft, Arc, for rapid global cargo delivery, hypersonic testing, and national security missions. Inversion operates design, manufacturing, and integration under one roof in Los Angeles.

Position Overview

The aerothermal environments that Inversion's vehicles fly through exceed the capabilities of off-the-shelf analysis tools. As the Staff Aerothermal CFD Methods Engineer, you will build and extend the computational tools your aerothermal team depends on by developing new physics models, numerics, and solver capabilities. A meaningful portion of this work will involve developing extensions to US3D.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and extend computational tools used to characterize the aerothermal environment around reentry vehicles.
• Develop, implement, and validate extensions to existing high enthalpy flow solvers, spanning physics models, numerical methods, and solver infrastructure.
• Implement and improve models of high-temperature gas dynamics, including thermochemical non-equilibrium and finite-rate chemistry including ablation products or other additional species present in flow.
• Develop multi-phase flow modeling capability with an emphasis on droplet interactions, atomization and breakup, evaporation, droplet-shock and droplet-surface interaction, and two-way coupling between dispersed and continuous phases.
• Verify and validate new capabilities against analytical solutions, ground test, and flight data.
• Work closely with production aerothermal analysts to harden new capabilities into reliable, documented tools.
• Mentor engineers across the aerothermal team.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Aerospace or Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or equivalent experience in a related field.
• Typically 9+ years of experience developing CFD methods and solver capabilities.
• Experience writing, extending or modifying high-enthalpy CFD solvers.
• Experience modeling high-temperature gas dynamics and chemistry, including thermochemical non-equilibrium.
• Experience modeling multi-phase flows with an emphasis on droplet interactions, such as spray atomization and breakup modeling for fuel injection systems, or coolant droplet modeling for turbine engines.
• Strong fundamentals in numerical methods for compressible flow, including finite volume discretization, shock capturing, and implicit solution methods.
• Proficiency in compiled scientific programming languages such as Fortran, C, or C++.
• Proven ability to work effectively in a fast-paced environment, including prototyping and rapid iteration of new products.
• Must have the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government Secret/Top Secret security clearance.

Desired Qualifications

• PhD in Aerospace or Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related field.
• Familiarity with both Lagrangian and Eulerian approaches to particle tracking as well as experience with droplet breakup and dispersion models (e.g., KH-RT, TAB).
• Experience with Fortran, particularly in the context of extending existing solver codebases.
• Direct experience with US3D, including extension through user-defined subroutines.
• Experience with plasma simulation for weakly ionized flows and/or experience with electromagnetic simulation.
• Experience with parallel scientific computing (e.g., MPI) on large-scale HPC systems.