Senior Thermal Modeling & Analysis Engineer

About Radiant Radiant is an El Segundo, CA-based company building the world's only mass-produced, transportable nuclear microreactors. The U.S. grid is under growing strain, with power demand accelerating, driving higher utility costs, rising carbon emissions, and interconnection backlogs. Radiant has a solution, transportable, on-site power. Our first reactor, Kaleidos, is 1 megawatt: small enough to be factory-built, transported by land, sea, or air, and deployed wherever power is needed.

1 MW can power 1000 homes for five years. Ship it back and we refuel for a 20 year operating life. We made energy a product that can be used for critical infrastructure like military bases, data centers, hospitals, and remote sites, as well as the commercial main street businesses that keep America running. Founded in 2020, Radiant is under contract to deliver power to the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force and has signed pre-order agreements with Equinix, with deployments beginning in 2028.About

the Role Radiant is seeking a driven Senior Thermal Modeling & Analysis Engineer to own high-fidelity CFD and thermal modeling for the Kaleidos microreactor. You will analyze heat generation and transport, high-temperature gas flow, and thermal interactions across reactor systems, cooling systems, shielding, and surrounding hardware under steady-state, transient, and off-normal conditions.

Your work will directly influence system architecture, component design, material selection, operating limits, test planning, and safety margins. You will work across mechanical, fluid systems, nuclear, structures, controls, and test engineering to develop validated analytical tools that support the commercialization of the first mass-produced nuclear reactor.

Responsibilities & Duties:

Own thermal and CFD analyses from problem definition through model development, execution, validation, documentation, and design recommendation.

Model turbulent gas flow, conduction, convection, radiation, conjugate heat transfer, and coupled multiphysics behavior across Kaleidos systems.

Evaluate steady-state, transient, and off-normal operating conditions to identify hotspots, thermal gradients, heat loads, flow distribution, pressure losses, and system margins.

Define modeling assumptions, boundary conditions, material properties, and appropriate fidelity based on the engineering decision being supported.

Translate analytical results into actionable design recommendations and collaborate with engineering teams through design iteration.

Establish and implement simulation best practices, including convergence assessment, mesh and time-step independence, sensitivity studies, uncertainty evaluation, and model verification.

Correlate analytical models with test data and update modeling assumptions based on measured system behavior.

Build automated, reproducible workflows for parametric studies, design exploration, post-processing, and simulation efficiency.

Develop and validate reduced-order models that support system-level analysis and rapid design iteration.

Clearly communicate assumptions, limitations, risks, margins, and recommendations to cross-functional teams.

Required

Qualifications & Skills:

Bachelor’s degree in mechanical, aerospace, nuclear engineering, physics, or a related field.
5+ years of relevant thermal, CFD, or thermal-fluid analysis experience.

Extensive experience with STAR-CCM+, Ansys Fluent, or comparable CFD software.

Strong foundation in heat transfer, fluid mechanics, turbulence modeling, and numerical methods.

Experience performing steady-state and transient thermal-fluid analyses.

Experience with model verification, sensitivity studies, and validation or test correlation.

Ability to prepare and simplify CAD geometry for analysis using…