Senior Thermal Engineer

Purpose

As a Senior Thermal Engineer, you will serve as the technical authority for Divergent’s aero-structures portfolio, responsible for pushing the envelope of our technology with respect to thermal optimization and performance of Divergent’s structural components. You’ll be accountable for owning the full development life cycle from conceptual design through customer delivery, ensuring high-performance, reliable systems that meet the demands of complex, unforgiving environments.

This role demands both technical depth and program maturity: the ability to engage government and industry partners to refine requirements for thermal performance for both new and legacy systems, while fostering internal alignment across internal engineering teams. You will be called on to derive thermal requirements in the absence of written specifications and are expected to challenge and shape requirements when appropriate — ensuring that the final product meets mission intent.

The Role

• Serve as the thermal design authority for Divergent’s A&D Structures team, owning thermal architecture from concept through qualification.
• Define, negotiate, and validate thermal requirements and budgets with government and industry customers.
• Develop thermal management strategies and lead internal trade studies—including heat rejection, insulation, and material selection.
• Guide thermal aspects of design reviews, establish standardized thermal maturity metrics and qualification criteria across Divergent’s A&D customer portfolio.
• Build and maintain high-fidelity thermal models (conduction, convection, radiation, steady state and transient analyses) and drive correlation with test data throughout the product lifecycle. Accountable for comprehensive thermal qualification and verification planning, including environmental testing, thermal cycling, and thermal analysis correlation.
• Collaborate with senior technical experts to establish thermal analysis standards and model technical excellence inside and outside the organization, including with government customers and prime contractors.
• Support vehicle builds and product development testing, including thermal instrumentation, data reduction, and troubleshooting.
• Collaborates with senior technical experts to establish technical standards, and models technical excellence inside and outside the organization including government customers and prime contractors.

Basic Qualifications:

• Ability to lawfully access information and technology that is subject to US export controls.
• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or equivalent technical discipline with a thermal sciences focus.
• Minimum 8 years of experience in thermal analysis, design, or management.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to synthesize complex thermal development engineering to simple terms and find alignment across multifunctional stakeholders including government customers and prime contractors.
• Strong analytical and practical mindset—comfortable navigating ambiguity and driving structured clarity across thermal, structural, and systems boundaries.
• Demonstrated excellence in thermal requirements definition, verification planning, and risk management across terrestrial & space thermal development and multidisciplinary teams.
• Experience interfacing with engineering, testing, and manufacturing groups to understand system designs and the associated thermal constraints.
• Demonstrated expertise in thermal analysis throughout the design, build, and test phases of a development cycle, including steady-state and transient modeling.
• Proficiency with industry thermal analysis tools such as ANSYS (Fluent, Thermal Desktop, Icepak), Star CCM+, PowerFlow.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Current Secret DoD security clearance or ability to obtain and retain clearance within 365 days from submission.
• 8+ years of experience in a broad range of terrestrial and space system development applications and qualification.
• Familiarity with relevant MIL-STDs (e.g., MIL-STD-810 thermal methods, MIL-STD-1540 environmental testing) and NASA STD’s (e.g., NASA-STD-7002 – Thermal Verification, KSC-STD-Z-0017). Proficiency in NASA-ST-6030 - Additive Manufacturing Requirements for Spaceflight Systems preferred.
• Demonstrated excellence in developing thermal solutions for aerospace and defense applications, including aerodynamic heating, electronics cooling, and propulsion thermal management.
• Experience with additive manufacturing, advanced thermal interface materials, or novel cooling architectures.
• Expert understanding of thermophysical properties and thermal behavior of various material systems (composites, adhesives, metals) across operational temperature ranges.
• Experience with thermal vacuum testing, altitude simulation, and correlation of thermal models to test data.

Work Environment

• Requires frequent standing, walking, and interaction across production and R&D work areas.
• May occasionally require extended or weekend hours to meet production deadlines.
• Work is performed in an office environment and requires the ability to operate standard office equipment and keyboards.  

Compensation

At Divergent, our pay range is based on the level of the job.  For this role, we will consider candidates at level E05 as evaluated through our interview process

• EO5 / Senior: $141,380 - $194,390