Senior Thermal Engineer (Lunar)

Location: Long Beach, California, United States; full-time position located at the Long Beach site. Willingness to work evenings and/or weekends for critical mission milestones; travel up to 5% for customer meetings.

Salary: $147,000–$249,000 USD annually in California.

Company

hirify.global develops commercial space stations, satellite products, lunar and Mars habitats, government space stations, and other crewed space infrastructure.

What you will do

• Define the thermal control architecture for lunar surface power, habitat, airlock, and node systems, trading passive, heat-pipe, pumped-loop, and thermal-storage approaches.
• Size and place radiators and own lunar-night survival cases, including heater power, thermal mass, phase-change storage, dormancy, and wake-up states.
• Design thermal control for crewed systems, including cabin temperature and humidity control, condensing heat exchangers, coolant loops, and depressurization/repressurization transients.
• Build and maintain detailed system thermal models, develop reduced-order models, and correlate predictions with flight-hardware test data.
• Own thermal budgets across launch, cruise, descent, landed day, landed night, and off-nominal conditions; select coatings, MLI, heat pipes, straps, isolators, heaters, thermostats, and RTDs.
• Plan and execute TVAC and thermal-balance campaigns, establish test criteria, define thermal design standards and margin policy, and support design reviews, drawing checks, and NASA technical deliverables.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Physics, or a related technical discipline.
• 6+ years of spacecraft or aerospace thermal engineering experience, including spacecraft thermal-control design and analysis.
• Experience building and correlating thermal models for flight hardware.
• Experience with extreme-environment or wide-swing thermal design where both hot and cold cases drive the design.
• Familiarity with thermal coatings, MLI, radiators, heat pipes, thermal straps, and heater/thermostat design.
• Comfort working during early architecture phases.
• Experience with multiple thermal analysis tools, such as Thermal Desktop, SINDA/FLUINT, ESATAN, or equivalent.

Nice to have

• TVAC and thermal-balance test planning and execution experience.
• Lunar or planetary surface thermal experience, including diurnal survival design, thermal switches, and regolith conduction modeling.
• Crewed-vehicle thermal experience with cabin ATCS, condensing heat exchangers, humidity control, ECLSS thermal interfaces, or touch-temperature compliance.
• Airlock, EVA, or suit thermal experience, including depressurization/repressurization transients.
• Pumped-fluid-loop experience, including working-fluid selection, pump and accumulator sizing, freeze protection, and loop control.
• Familiarity with lunar-dust effects on thermo-optical properties and dust-mitigation strategies.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time exempt employment with company equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents; paid parental leave; disability and life insurance.
• Paid time off, including up to 20+ vacation days for exempt staff, with annual vacation cash-out available.
• Access to a 401(k), ClassPass credits, personalized mental healthcare, and other discounts and perks.
• Onsite food benefits include snacks, coffee, cold drinks, dinner meals, and subsidized lunch.

Hiring process

• Compensation and level are calibrated to job-related knowledge, education, skills, experience, business needs, market demand, and demonstrated capability.