Senior Thermal Engineer

What you’ll do

• Own thermal design of the aircraft, from first-order sizing through validation against altitude chamber and flight data.
• Model at the fidelity the decision requires — hand calculations and 1-D networks early, CFD and FEA when warranted.
• Own battery thermal management: insulation, heater sizing, and cold-soak survival. This is the constraint that sets our endurance.
• Deliver thermal solutions for avionics, powertrain, and payloads against aggressive mass targets, and select the materials, coatings, and interfaces to get there.
• Quantify how temperature drives the power budget. Solar cell, battery, and motor efficiency all move with temperature, and your analysis feeds the energy balance that keeps the aircraft up.
• Define and run thermal testing: setups, instrumentation, procedures, and correlation of models to measured data.
• Work across structures, avionics, power, and manufacturing, and present thermal status at design and failure reviews.

What we’re looking for

• 3+ years in thermal analysis or thermal design of flight, space, or high-reliability hardware, with a degree in mechanical, aerospace, or another engineering discipline.
• A thermal design you took from analysis through test and into flying hardware.
• Experience in low-convection environments where radiation dominates — spacecraft, high-altitude, or UAV.
• Strong 0-D and 1-D thermal network modeling, plus Thermal Desktop, ANSYS, Simcenter, or equivalent, and Python or MATLAB for tooling.
• Battery thermal management experience: pack-level modeling, heater strategies, and cold-soak survival.
• Hands-on test experience with thermal-vacuum or altitude chambers, instrumentation, and model correlation.
• Comfort working on the floor with hardware and technicians.

Why Icarus

• Meaningful equity
• Top market salary and bonuses
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Factory in El Segundo
• Real ownership, real hardware, real flight
• Small team, massive responsibility (but growing very fast)
• High signal (engineering) to noise (management) culture
• Dream desk setup
• Daily lunch
• Unlimited celsius

US salary range

$150,000 - $190,000 USD The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors, inclusive of base salary only. Actual salary may vary based on (but not limited to) work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Highly competitive equity grants are considered part of Icarus' total compensation package.