Lead Hypersonic Re-Entry Engineer

Hop Aero is a venture-backed startup building rockets that deliver cargo anywhere on Earth in minutes. Our mission is to enable resilient global logistics to protect and improve our way of life. Our founding team has prior experience founding a satellite startup and taking it to orbit, launching 20+ Falcon 9 missions at SpaceX, and leading engineering teams at some of the world’s most advanced aerospace organizations.

The company is well-capitalized through venture funding and government contracts.

We’re hiring a Lead Hypersonic Reentry Engineer to own the analysis, design, and development of Hop Aero’s atmospheric reentry capability.

This is a foundational technical role spanning hypersonic aerodynamics, aerothermal environments, thermal protection, trajectory trades, vehicle design, testing, and flight-hardware development. You will help define how our vehicles survive high-speed atmospheric flight and repeated reentry while remaining practical, manufacturable, and rapidly reusable.

We’re looking for a broad reentry engineer who can operate across disciplines. You should be comfortable building first-principles models, running CFD, evaluating TPS concepts, working with structures and GNC teams, designing experiments, and using test data to close the loop between simulation and real hardware.

This is not purely a CFD or thermal-analysis role. You will be expected to make vehicle-level engineering decisions, own hardware and test programs, and help take the reentry system from early analysis through flight.

• Serve as the responsible engineer for hypersonic reentry, aerothermal environments, and thermal-protection systems
• Define vehicle aerodynamic and heating environments across hypersonic entry, atmospheric deceleration, and descent
• Develop first-principles and numerical models for hypersonic aerodynamics, convective heating, radiative heating, and conductive heat transfer
• Perform CFD and other high-fidelity analysis for high-speed atmospheric flight
• Develop aerodynamic and aerothermal databases for use by GNC, structures, propulsion, and vehicle-design teams
• Support trajectory and vehicle-shape trades to balance range, heating, stability, control authority, and structural loads
• Evaluate and select TPS architectures, materials, coatings, insulation systems, and attachment concepts
• Perform coupled aero-thermal-structural analysis to inform vehicle geometry and hardware design
• Assess thermal margins, hot spots, shock interactions, boundary-layer effects, uncertainties, and off-nominal environments
• Define and execute material, coupon, component, and subsystem test campaigns
• Work directly with suppliers and manufacturing teams to develop practical, repeatable reentry hardware
• Correlate analytical models with ground-test and flight-test data
• Develop instrumentation strategies for temperature, heat flux, pressure, strain, and related diagnostics
• Support wind-tunnel, arc-jet, high-enthalpy, and flight-test campaigns as applicable
• Translate reentry environments into requirements for structures, propulsion, avionics, GNC, and vehicle systems
• Own hypersonic reentry technical risks through design reviews, test-readiness reviews, and flight-readiness reviews
• Work in person with the team at our shop in Orange, CA

• 5-10 years of relevant experience in hypersonics, reentry, high-speed aerodynamics, aerothermal engineering, thermal protection, or closely related fields
• Strong understanding of compressible flow, hypersonic aerodynamics, heat transfer, boundary layers, shock interactions, and high-temperature gas dynamics
• Experience modeling aerodynamic and aerothermal environments for high-speed vehicles
• Experience with CFD and numerical methods for hypersonic or thermally…