Senior Thermal & TPS Integration Engineer (Hypersonic Vehicles)

Location: Torrance, California, or Rio Rancho, New Mexico, United States

Company

Early-stage aerospace company developing and delivering advanced defense systems and long-range hypersonic strike vehicles.

What you will do

• Design and develop vehicle-wide thermal protection systems, including heat shields, acreage TPS, leading-edge protection, and control-surface solutions.
• Develop internal thermal protection using insulators, blankets, and standoff systems to protect avionics and primary structures.
• Lead TPS architecture and integration with structures, mechanisms, and subsystems, including attachments, gaps, seals, and strain isolation.
• Perform thermal and thermal-structural analyses covering extreme aerothermal heating, transient environments, thermal expansion, deformation, and interface behavior.
• Coordinate with structures, materials, aerothermal, GNC, and manufacturing teams while optimizing designs for mass, durability, performance, and manufacturability.
• Support prototyping, assembly, hardware bring-up, qualification testing, flight testing, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis; mentor junior engineers and advise on technical trades.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, materials science, or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience designing, analyzing, and validating thermal protection systems for aerospace or high-temperature applications.
• Strong knowledge of aerothermal environments, heat transfer, high-temperature materials, and TPS for flight vehicles.
• Experience with ceramics, carbon-carbon, ablatives, insulating blankets, seals, gaps, and interfaces in high-temperature moving or constrained systems.
• Proficiency with thermal and structural analysis tools such as ANSYS, MATLAB, or equivalent, plus experience with arc-jet, furnace, or similar testing.
• Experience building, testing, and troubleshooting hardware in laboratory or flight-hardware environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Fast-paced, hardware-driven environment with high flight cadence.
• Significant ownership and direct impact on mission-critical defense capabilities.
• Generous benefits package.
• Access to classified information or restricted U.S. Government sites may require a U.S. Government security clearance, government authorization, and applicable citizenship or eligibility requirements.
• Access to export-controlled information requires eligibility to access the information without additional export licensing.