Thermal Engineer, AI Satellites (Starmind)
SpaceXAerospace company
Bastrop, United StatesSenior
Founders Fund
Sequoia Capital
Baillie Gifford
Google
Fidelity Investments
Valor Equity Partners
About the role
TL;DR
Thermal Engineer for AI satellites, focusing on cooling system design and analysis.
- •SpaceX is developing Starmind, a new constellation of satellites for AI compute in space.
- •This role focuses on the thermal challenges of dissipating hundreds of kilowatts of heat from a dense compute payload.
- •Key Responsibilities Own conjugate heat-transfer (CHT) and thermal-fluid analysis of high-performance cold plates, heat exchangers, and radiator channels.
- •Own the system 0-D/1-D thermal-fluid network for cooling loop sizing and balancing.
- •Drive cooling-loop architecture trades with hardware and vehicle-level thermal teammates.
- •Predict component and system performance under wide range of flow and thermal conditions.
- •Own pre-test prediction, test design, and model-test correlation for fluid component and integrated thermal tests.
- •Requirements Bachelor's degree in mechanical, aerospace, or a related engineering discipline. 1+ years of professional experience in fluids, CFD, or thermal analysis.
- •Master's degree in mechanical, aerospace, or a related engineering discipline (preferred).
- •Steady/transient conjugate heat-transfer CFD of liquid-cooled or high-heat-flux hardware (STAR-CCM+, ANSYS Fluent/CFX, or equivalent) (preferred).
- •Hands on hardware testing inclusive of instrumentation selection and model correlation (preferred).
Required skills
PythonGit
Domain expertise
aerospaceai
Tech stack
PythonC++Git