Thermodynamics Performance Engineer

Thermodynamics Performance Engineer

El Segundo, CA

At Arbor Energy & Resources Corporation ("Arbor Energy"), we're creating technology to power our lives while protecting the planet that sustains them. Our advanced power systems deliver clean, reliable baseload electricity with zero operating emissions—modular, fuel-flexible, and engineered for the realities of today's energy demand. At the core is a supercritical CO₂ turbine with integrated carbon capture, designed to bring carbon-neutral power online quickly at meaningful scale.

Our team includes aerospace engineers, combustion experts, and systems thinkers with a shared goal: to build technology worthy of the world we want to live in. While many of us began our journeys looking to the stars, we're applying that expertise here at home to deliver dependable, emission-free baseload power and a future of lasting abundance.

If you share our values and are drawn to rigorous work with lasting impact, we'd love to learn more about you. Come build what the future will run on.

Steward our planet:
We build for tomorrow, ensuring every bolt we tighten and every hand we lend leaves our environment stronger than we found it.

Lead with Love:
We champion the success of our people, partners, and planet, nurturing excellence through camaraderie and rigor.

Explore the Uncharted:
We embrace the unknown with curiosity, using courage and discipline to transform uncertainty into opportunity.

We're looking for a Thermodynamics Performance Engineer to own the dynamic and steady-state thermodynamic models of our direct-fired supercritical CO₂ Brayton cycle. You'll be the person who turns integrated system behavior into clear, actionable insight — running performance studies ahead of test campaigns, reconciling predictions against test data, and growing our modeling capability into a digital-twin-quality simulation platform that supports controls development, trip response, and eventual hardware-in-the-loop testing.

You'll work closely with our test, combustion, turbo machinery, recuperator, fluid systems, and controls engineers. This is the simulation backbone for a first-of-a-kind power system, and the work is foundational to how we operate, validate, and scale the technology.

This is an onsite opportunity in our El Segundo, CA office.

• Own the integrated cycle performance model — steady-state and dynamic — for our direct-fired sCO₂ Brayton power loop, maintaining and advancing it through the hardware lifecycle
• Run performance prediction and sensitivity studies ahead of test campaigns; reconcile model output against test data to drive model refinement and surface component-level insights
• Own the architecture call on how our dynamic modeling stack should evolve over time — what platform, what fidelity, on what evidence
• Build property tables, turbo machinery map handling, heat exchanger transient models, and combustor representations appropriate to the cycle and fidelity required
• Collaborate with combustion, turbo machinery, and heat exchanger engineers to integrate component data into system-level models; collaborate with controls and software teams on closed-loop simulation and HIL planning
• Develop simulation infrastructure — scripted scenario runs, parameter sweeps, validation cases — that makes the model usable by engineers beyond yourself

• Bachelor's degree in Chemical, Mechanical, Aerospace, Nuclear, or related Engineering field
• 4+ years of experience in cycle performance analysis, thermodynamic systems modeling, or dynamic process simulation
• Strong fundamentals in thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer, applied to integrated multi-component systems
• Demonstrated experience building dynamic simulation models of fluid/thermal systems in an industry-grade 1D system simulation platform — and a clear point of view on tool tradeoffs for closed-loop power cycle applications
• Working knowledge of integrated power loop equipment — heat exchanger sizing, compressor/pump curves, valve Cv, piping hydraulics — and how each shows up in dynamic response
• Programming proficiency:
  Python for data reduction and automation; one of…