Job Description

Thermal Engineer

Costa Mesa, California, United States

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company with a mission to transform U.S. and allied military capabilities with advanced technology. By bringing the expertise, technology, and business model of the 21st century's most innovative companies to the defense industry, Anduril is changing how military systems are designed, built and sold. Anduril's family of systems is powered by Lattice OS, an AI-powered operating system that turns thousands of data streams into a realtime, 3D command and control center. As the world enters an era of strategic competition, Anduril is committed to bringing cutting-edge autonomy, AI, computer vision, sensor fusion, and networking technology to the military in months, not years.

About The Job

We are looking for a 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 fundamentals, strong thermal analysis capability, and the practical judgment to choose the right level of analysis, from first-order hand calculations through detailed FEA / CFD, to guide fast design decisions.

What You'll Do

• 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.
• Support failure reviews and root-cause investigations using test data, thermal analysis, and first-principles reasoning.

Impact You'll Have

• Drive thermal architecture decisions that directly influence the performance, reliability, and deployability of advanced defense products.
• Help engineering teams move faster by turning thermal analysis and test data into clear design recommendations.
• Reduce technical risk across high-power, highly integrated systems operating in extreme environments.
• Build scalable analysis tools and methods that improve how Anduril evaluates thermal performance across multiple product lines.

Required Qualifications

• 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.
• 2+ 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.
• Experience designing thermal hardware such as heat sinks, cold plates, fans, pumps, heat exchangers, thermal interface materials, liquid cooling systems, or air-cooling systems.
• Experience planning or executing thermal tests, including sensor selection, data acquisition, data post-processing, and correlation of test results to analysis.
• Experience with SolidWorks, Siemens NX, or comparable CAD tools.
• Experience supporting formal design reviews, customer reviews, flight test, qualification testing, or fielded hardware.
• Experience developing reusable analysis tools, automation workflows, reduced-order models, or other methods that improve analysis speed and consistency.
• Strong motivation to support Anduril's mission of defending the United States and allied partners.

US Salary Range $129,000 - $171,000 USD

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