Aerospace Thermal Engineer — Space Infrastructure | Austin, TX (On-site)

Aerospace Structures & Thermal Engineer — Space Infrastructure | Austin, TX (On-site)

Client is a 12-person space infrastructure company building autonomous bio-factories in orbit — producing advanced materials and enabling drug discovery impossible on Earth. Two satellites launched, NASA TechLeap Prize winner, 8 more missions planned over the next two years. $30M funded, Series A incoming.

You'll own structural and thermal design end-to-end on their next generation of spacecraft. The critical question is yours to answer: will this vehicle survive?

What you'll do

• Design primary structures, load paths, internal supports, and hard points; lead mass reduction efforts
• Perform FEA, thermal modeling, and margin calculations using ANSYS to validate flight hardware
• Select and evaluate materials — composites, ablatives, thermal barrier systems — for extreme environments
• Develop and execute qualification test plans covering structural, thermal, vibration, and environmental testing
• Collaborate closely with GNC, systems engineering, and manufacturing teams through to flight

Stack: ANSYS, Nastran, Abaqus, Python, MATLAB, CAD

Strong fit if you have:

• 3–8 years aerospace structures and/or thermal engineering with hands-on flight hardware experience
• Personally designed hardware that flew — spacecraft, launch vehicle, reentry system, missile, or hypersonics; must be able to describe specific subsystem ownership in technical detail
• Experience in high-temperature environments where thermal management was a primary design constraint
• Background in composite structures, ablative materials, or thermal protection systems
• BS or higher in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or Physics

Details:

• Full-time, 5 days on-site in Austin TX
• $150K–$180K depending on experience + competitive equity
• Must be a U.S. Person (citizen or permanent resident); no visa sponsorship

Not a fit:

• Cannot describe specific hardware they personally designed — peripheral contributors to large programs are not a fit
• Pure analysts with no hardware design or build experience
• Legacy aerospace prime backgrounds with low ownership, slow-cadence program experience