Senior Thermal Engineer Verified today
About the Team
The Integrated Performance team owns the holistic view of how Terran R comes together, ensuring every system achieves ambitious objectives. You will work across the full launch system, from trajectory design and aerodynamics to reliability analysis, with direct influence on all parts of the product lifecycle from concept to post-flight review. Team members engage hands-on with hardware and operations, with authority to drive meaningful programmatic change.
The Thermal team predicts temperatures and designs thermal architectures for structures, fluids, components, and avionics on reusable launch vehicles. Using first principle calculations, reduced order modeling, and detailed thermal modeling, the team drives cross-disciplinary vehicle designs and collaborates with hardware engineers to overcome design and integration challenges.
About the Role
- Drive development of primary structures, secondary structures, fluids hardware, and avionics that survive extreme thermal environments
- Own the architecture, sizing, and development of thermal systems like insulation, heaters, thermal protection, and environmental conditioning in collaboration with peer technical teams
- Build, execute, and validate thermal analyses at component, sub-system, and vehicle level, including tool development and automation
- Direct design and development engineers in successful application of thermal sciences to achieve system and component requirements
- Develop and execute tests to support thermal systems development and qualification, including hands-on work like test article integration, instrumentation setup, and data processing
- Support vehicle and engine thermal system development, stage testing, and flight operations
About You
- Bachelor's degree in engineering or related field
- 5+ years experience in thermal analysis
- Proficiency in component and system level thermal and fluids analysis using toolsets like Sinda/Fluint/Thermal Desktop or other commercial FEM/FDM/FVM solvers
- Experience in an analysis role on an integrated vehicle program
- Hands-on experience writing test plans and performing testing, instrumentation, and data analysis at component and system level
- Experience solving complex problems on integrated vehicles with design teams
- Experience with engineering scripting languages like MATLAB or Python
Nice to Have
- Graduate degree in engineering or related field
- 8+ years experience in thermal analysis
- Familiarity with liquid rocket stage, engine architecture, and operations
- Understanding of supersonic aerodynamics and aeroheating
- Experience with launch vehicle thermal protection system materials and sizing
- Experience with start to finish design cycles of multiple vehicles
Compensation
Hiring range: $132,000 to $198,000 USD. Compensation based on experience, qualifications, and job-related factors. Relativity Space offers competitive salary and equity, generous PTO and sick leave, parental leave, annual learning and development stipend, and additional benefits.