Senior Thermal Engineer

About the Team

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.

About the Job

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 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.