Thermal Engineer (Spacecraft)

Location: On-site in Burlingame, California, United States. U.S. roles require applicants to be U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, or other protected individuals under 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3).

Salary: $132K–$178K annually, plus equity. Final level and offer depend on education, qualifications, skills, abilities, and relevant experience.

Company

hirify.global develops Pulsar, a low Earth orbit satellite infrastructure platform for real-time, centimeter-level positioning and navigational intelligence.

What you will do

• Develop and maintain component, assembly, subsystem, and spacecraft-level thermal models.
• Perform steady-state and transient thermal analyses covering operating temperatures, thermal margins, heater requirements, interfaces, materials, insulation, and environmental performance.
• Collaborate with mechanical, electrical, systems, integration, manufacturing, and test engineers to provide thermal design guidance and reduce downstream risk.
• Develop and lead TVAC, thermal-chamber, thermal-cycling, and targeted R&D test campaigns, including objectives, instrumentation, configurations, procedures, and reports.
• Prepare hardware and instrumentation, execute tests, monitor data, troubleshoot anomalies, and lead post-test reviews and inspections.
• Correlate models with test data, improve test infrastructure and analysis tools, and contribute thermal evidence to design reviews and flight qualification.

Requirements

• BS or MS in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related engineering discipline.
• Early-career to mid-career experience in thermal engineering, thermal analysis, environmental testing, or a closely related hardware discipline.
• Strong understanding of heat transfer, including conduction, convection, radiation, transient thermal behavior, thermal interfaces, and material properties.
• Experience creating, reviewing, or using thermal models for hardware, components, or integrated systems.
• Experience supporting hands-on hardware testing in a laboratory, environmental-test, aerospace, or similarly rigorous hardware environment.
• Ability to develop clear engineering documentation, including test procedures, analysis summaries, reports, and presentations.
• Strong organizational skills, attention to detail, comfort working directly with hardware, and ability to independently drive technical work and solve ambiguous problems.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across engineering disciplines.

Nice to have

• Experience with spacecraft thermal-analysis tools such as Thermal Desktop/SINDA, ESATAN, or equivalent.
• Direct experience supporting or leading TVAC, thermal-vacuum, thermal-cycling, or thermal-chamber tests.
• Experience with thermocouples, RTDs, heaters, data-acquisition systems, vacuum-compatible hardware, and test instrumentation.
• Experience correlating thermal models with environmental-test data.
• Familiarity with GEVS, MIL-STD-1540, ECSS, or SMC-S-016 standards and practices.
• Experience using Python, MATLAB, or similar tools for test-data reduction, analysis, or automation.
• Experience in aerospace, space, robotics, research, or other high-reliability hardware environments.
• Experience developing, troubleshooting, automating, or modifying thermal or TVAC chamber capabilities.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time, on-site engineering role with direct hands-on work with spacecraft hardware.
• Work across mechanical, electrical, systems, integration, manufacturing, and test disciplines.
• Opportunity to grow into ownership of increasingly complex subsystem- and spacecraft-level thermal analysis.
• Equity is included in the compensation package.
• Inclusive workplace committed to diversity and equal consideration for qualified applicants.