Senior Thermal Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 19, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 5, 2026.
The Opportunity
Our client is tackling a fundamentally unsolved problem in thermal engineering. Using an AI-driven platform (Flux), they are designing heat exchangers in a way that traditional, intuition-based methods simply cannot match. This isn’t incremental optimization-it is a new paradigm at the intersection of physics, machine learning, and advanced manufacturing.
As a single-digit hire at this seed-stage company, your work will directly determine the company’s scale. You aren’t just contributing to a system; you are expanding the frontier of what the system can do. You will operate as the critical human layer on top of AI, validating and pushing designs that don’t yet exist in the real world.
The Role
We are seeking a Senior Thermal Engineer (PhD + ~5 years post-PhD experience) who lives and breathes heat transfer and fluid dynamics. This is a role for a true thermal specialist-not a generalist. You will play a critical "human-in-the-loop" role for the AI platform, validating, challenging, and extending what the system produces.
What you will be doing:
End-to-End Design: Create heat exchangers from a blank CAD file to simulation-backed geometry, targeting aggressive thermal and pressure-drop specs.
AI Validation: Act as the human validator for the Flux platform, using 1D first-principles models and high-fidelity CFD/CHT to ensure outputs are physically correct.
Advanced Simulation: Utilize tools like STAR-CCM+, Ansys Fluent, nTop, and EES to drive real engineering decisions and evaluate complex trade-offs.
Additive Manufacturing Integration: Design with manufacturability in mind, specifically for Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), ensuring concepts are viable for production.
Physical Testing: Close the loop between simulation and reality by planning validation experiments and refining models based on real-world data.
Who You Are
You have a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related field with a heavy focus on thermal-fluids.
You have 5+ years of post-PhD experience specifically in high-performance heat exchanger design.
You are an expert in CFD/CHT and possess a deep intuition for fluid dynamics that allows you to spot "hallucinations" in simulation or AI outputs.
You are comfortable in a high-intensity, seed-stage environment where you own the problem space.