Staff Engineer, Aircraft Thermal Systems - Ranger (R6351)

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide.

For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube

What you'll do

• Thermal System Ownership: Define and mature aircraft-level thermal environments and thermal management solutions for vehicle bays, hot surfaces, and other thermal-critical installations.
• Thermal Analysis and Modeling: Perform first-principles heat transfer and fluid mechanics calculations, then develop analytical, finite-difference, and CFD models to characterize conduction, convection, radiation, and coupled thermal-fluid behavior.
• Cooling System Design: Design and evaluate active and passive cooling solutions, including heat-rejection paths, airflow, ducting, thermal interfaces, and hardware needed to manage vehicle thermal loads

Requirements

and Risk Management: Generate thermal requirements, assess technical risks, and develop actionable design recommendations that balance thermal performance with vehicle power, mass, volume, maintainability, and integration constraints. Vehicle and Hardware Integration: Develop thermal hardware layouts and CAD models, and resolve interfaces with structures, avionics, fluid systems, EWIS, and adjacent mechanical systems.