Thermal Engineer, AI Satellites (Starmind)

About the role

SpaceX is leveraging its experience deploying and operating the world's largest satellite constellation to develop Starmind, a new constellation of satellites capturing solar energy in space to power low-cost, high-performance AI compute for Earth. Scaling AI in space is a thermal problem as much as a power and processing problem. With a dense compute payload dissipating hundreds of kilowatts, the thermal system must efficiently transfer heat to large radiators that reject it to space, under solar load, eclipse, and multi-mode AI duty cycles.

You will join the Starmind Thermal team, which owns the satellite cooling stack end-to-end. Rejecting hundreds of kilowatts of accelerator waste heat to space is limited by high-flux loads transferring heat to massive deployable radiators. No capable cooling architecture has been flown at this scale.

As a Senior Thermal Engineer focused on fluids analysis, you own conjugate heat transfer and thermal-fluid analysis of cold plates, heat exchangers, and radiator channels and manifolds, and the system 0-D/1-D thermal-fluid network that sets flow split, P budget, loop T, and pump operating point. You co-evolve geometry and flow path with mechanical and fluid-systems owners under tight feedback from manufacturing and test.

You sit where the local physics is hardest and the design decisions stick: predictions that close margins, ground in test, and drive rate-production hardware.

Responsibilities

• Own conjugate heat-transfer (CHT) and thermal-fluid analysis of high-performance cold plates, heat exchangers, and radiator channels for STARMIND satellites
• Own the system 0-D/1-D thermal-fluid network that sizes and balances the cooling loop: flow split, P budget, loop T, pump operating point
• Drive cooling-loop architecture trades with hardware and vehicle-level thermal teammates
• Co-evolve geometry, materials and processes with hardware owners to find mass producible, efficient thermal solutions
• Predict component and system performance under wide range of flow and thermal conditions
• Own pre-test prediction, test design, and model-test correlation for fluid component and integrated thermal tests
• Automate analysis workflows for re-running trades as designs and boundary conditions change

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in mechanical, aerospace, or a related engineering discipline
• 1+ years of professional experience in fluids, CFD, or thermal analysis

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Master's degree in mechanical, aerospace, or a related engineering discipline
• Steady/transient conjugate heat-transfer CFD of liquid-cooled or high-heat-flux hardware (STAR-CCM+, ANSYS Fluent/CFX, or equivalent)
• Hand-calc checks and engineering judgment on mesh, turbulence modeling, and model fidelity
• Hands on hardware testing inclusive of instrumentation selection and model correlation
• Relevant manufacturing techniques, and judiciously pushing their constraints
• Watertight CFD geometry (Siemens NX or equivalent)
• Package/board-level tools as secondary (Icepak, Flotherm)
• 0-D/1-D thermal-fluid network modeling to size and balance cooling loops (flow split, P budget, loop T, pump operating point)
• Scripting analysis workflows and post-processing (Python preferred)

Additional Requirements

• Ability to work extended hours or weekends as needed for mission critical deadlines
• Some travel may occasionally be required

Itar Requirements

• To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.