- Robot type
- Drone · Defense
- Location
- Costa MesaCaliforniaUSA
- Job type
- Hardware
- Posted
- Jul 13, 2026
- Salary
- $146,000–$194,000 a year
Full-time
Senior Thermal Engineer
Job description
The Thermal Engineering team enables Anduril’s rapid hardware development cycle by ensuring advanced defense systems perform reliably in demanding real-world environments. The team works across high-power, tightly integrated products where thermal architecture, analysis, testing, and cross-functional design decisions directly affect product performance, reliability, and mission success.
We are looking for a Senior Thermal Engineer to join our team in Costa Mesa, CA . In this role, you will own thermal design and analysis for advanced defense hardware across drones, aircraft, missiles, and related flight systems.
This role is ideal for someone with deep heat transfer and fluid dynamics…
Job responsibilities
- Own thermal design and analysis for integrated hardware products, including drones, aircraft, missiles, or related defense systems.
- Use first-principles engineering judgment to determine the right level of analysis for each design decision, including hand calculations, spreadsheets, MATLAB / Python models, FEA, and CFD.
- Define thermal architectures that can withstand rugged environments, demanding flight envelopes, and operational edge cases, including hot, cold, transient, and mission-specific thermal conditions.
- Partner with electrical, mechanical, aerospace, software, and systems engineers to document power dissipation, operating modes, thermal constraints, and design tradeoffs.
- Build and maintain thermal FEA / CFD models to predict system performance, establish design limits, and define red / yellow operating thresholds for test and field use.
- Define and execute prototype builds and thermal tests, including CAD support, sensor selection, DAQ setup, data post-processing, and results documentation.
- Present thermal status, risks, tradeoffs, timelines, and recommendations in internal design reviews and customer-facing technical reviews.
- Develop internal tools, workflows, or analysis methods that improve speed, consistency, and quality of thermal decision-making.
Job requirements
- MS or PhD in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Applied Physics, or a related field with a focus on heat transfer, fluid dynamics, thermal sciences, or thermal systems.
- 5+ years of experience designing, analyzing, or validating thermal systems for integrated hardware products.
- Strong first-principles understanding of heat transfer and fluid dynamics, including conduction, convection, radiation, fluid flow, and transient thermal behavior.
- Experience supporting thermal design for aerospace, aircraft, rocket, missile, UAV, defense, or other high-performance hardware systems.
- Experience using thermal analysis, modeling, simulation, and/or physical test data to drive design decisions for passive or active thermal management systems.
- Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly across engineering, program, and customer stakeholders, and ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Top Secret security clearance.
- Experience with thermal analysis tools such as STAR-CCM+, ANSYS, Icepak, Flotherm, or comparable FEA / CFD platforms.
- Experience using MATLAB, Python, spreadsheets, or similar tools for first-order thermal modeling, transient analysis, or engineering trade studies.