Senior Thermal Engineer (Marine)

Location: Onsite in Portland, Oregon, United States. Relocation assistance is available for a move to Portland if needed.

Salary: $155,000–$200,000 per year, plus equity.

Company

hirify.global is a public benefit renewable energy and ocean technology company developing technologies that capture low-cost renewable energy from the oceans for computing and renewable fuel applications.

What you will do

• Own end-to-end thermal simulation and analysis workflows for payloads, electronics, cooling systems, pressure-contained assemblies, and related mechanical systems.
• Build fast, reliable thermal CFD workflows supporting rapid design iteration with mechanical, electrical, payload architecture, physics, and prototype teams.
• Translate heat loads, power maps, packaging constraints, and environmental conditions into system-level cooling requirements and hardware design targets.
• Analyze airflow, liquid cooling, heat sinks, cold plates, heat exchangers, thermal interfaces, pressure drops, and integrated thermal paths.
• Manage the complete CFD lifecycle, including CAD preparation, meshing, solver setup, debugging, convergence assessment, post-processing, visualization, and results communication.
• Validate simulations against laboratory tests, prototype measurements, field data, and experimental observations while developing reusable automation and optimization workflows.

Requirements

• Strong background in thermal engineering, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and numerical simulation.
• Deep experience with thermal CFD for electronics, compute systems, aerospace, marine, automotive, or other high-power engineered systems.
• Experience with the full CFD workflow, including geometry preparation, meshing, boundary conditions, solver setup, debugging, post-processing, and validation.
• Hands-on experience with STAR-CCM+, ANSYS Fluent, HELYX/OpenFOAM, or comparable high-performance CFD solvers.
• Experience assessing model fidelity, mesh sensitivity, turbulence models, conjugate heat transfer, transient effects, uncertainty, and numerical error.
• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, applied physics, or a related field; an advanced degree is preferred. NX experience and strong cross-disciplinary communication skills are preferred.

Nice to have

• Experience with sealed enclosures, pressure vessels, marine housings, aerospace hardware, or other ruggedized environmental packaging.
• GPU-accelerated CFD, high-performance computing, modern solver acceleration, or reusable simulation pipelines.
• Thermal design for high-power compute systems, GPU/CPU clusters, data center hardware, power electronics, or dense electronics payloads.
• Liquid cooling systems, cold plates, heat exchangers, pumps, manifolds, coolant loops, heat sinks, airflow management, and thermal interface materials.
• Adjoint optimization, automated design exploration, surrogate modeling, reduced-order modeling, rapid prototyping, or simulation-test correlation.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in an idea-meritocratic environment where strong technical ideas can change the company’s direction.
• Collaborate closely with applied physicists, mechanical and electrical engineers, payload designers, and prototype teams.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Health, dental, vision, and disability insurance with employer-paid coverage for employees and eligible dependents.
• Access to 401(k), health FSA, and dependent care FSA accounts, plus company equity.