Senior Computational Engineer

About the Company

We are a renewable energy and ocean technology company committed to rapidly developing and deploying technologies that will ensure a sustainable future for Earth by unlocking the vast energy potential of its oceans. Our focus is on capturing civilizational levels of ultra-low-cost renewable energy for applications including computing and affordable renewable fuels delivered to shore.

The company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and backed by leading venture capitalists, philanthropic investors, university endowments, and private investment offices. We operate as an idea meritocracy in which the best ideas change the company's direction on a regular basis.

About the Job

As a Senior Computational Engineer, you will lead and improve the use of high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to validate the performance of optimized marine system designs. You will serve as the bridge between fast-running reduced-order simulations, mechanical design, and the CFD team, ensuring that promising optimized geometries and operating strategies are evaluated rigorously before they influence major engineering decisions.

This role is highly technical and highly cross-functional. You will run and improve CFD workflows using Helyx, OpenFOAM, and/or Star-CCM+, validate optimized results against high-fidelity simulations, compare simulation outputs against experimental and sea-trial data, and communicate simulation confidence, assumptions, sensitivities, and validation status. You will be expected to diagnose difficult CFD issues, improve automation pipelines, post-process and visualize complex results, and help establish the standards by which performance claims are validated.

The ideal candidate has deep marine CFD experience, strong first-principles engineering judgment, and the ability to own major technical projects from ambiguous problem statements through validated conclusions. We are especially interested in candidates who can not only use CFD tools, but also improve them through scripting, automation, solver customization, OpenFOAM/Helyx development, or related code development.

Responsibilities

• Own the CFD-based performance validation process for optimized marine system designs, including geometry preparation, meshing, solver setup, execution, debugging, post-processing, visualization, and reporting.
• Use Helyx, OpenFOAM, and/or Star-CCM+ to evaluate optimized geometries and operating conditions generated by fast-running time-domain simulation, Boundary Element Method (BEM), and fleet deployment tools.
• Develop, maintain, and continuously improve CFD validation workflows and automation pipelines with support from other engineers and software developers.
• Improve robustness, accuracy, and reliability of advanced CFD workflows across complex marine operating conditions, including meshing, solver setup, turbulence modeling, boundary conditions, and post-processing workflows.
• Evaluate power, propulsion, hydrodynamic loading, device performance, and other key metrics using high-fidelity simulation data.
• Compare CFD results against reduced-order models, BEM tools, time-domain device simulations, experimental data, sea-trial measurements, and metocean observations.
• Work directly with data collected from prototype deployments and sea-trial campaigns to improve model fidelity and accelerate deployment readiness.
• Refine and extend internal validation standards to ensure CFD results are accurate, converged, and physically meaningful for design and operational decision-making.
• Develop clear visualizations, dashboards, plots, technical memos, and presentations that communicate simulation results, limitations, uncertainties, and recommended actions.
• Collaborate closely with optimization, controls, mechanical engineering, metocean data, fleet simulation, and experimental teams to close the loop between predicted and measured performance.
• Contribute to verification and validation of CFD methods using canonical cases, experimental data, sea-trial data, and internal benchmark problems.
• Run simulation workflows on on-premises and cloud-based HPC systems.
• Improve team velocity by increasing automation, reducing manual handoffs, documenting best practices, and developing reusable simulation templates.
• Use modern software and AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate coding, analysis, documentation, and simulation workflow development while maintaining strong technical judgment and verification discipline.

Required Qualifications

• Legal authorization to work in the United States.
• Bachelor's degree in Ocean Engineering, Naval Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Physics, Applied Mathematics, or a similar field.
• Strong foundation in fluid mechanics, marine hydrodynamics, rigid body dynamics, and physics-based modeling.
• Significant experience running end-to-end CFD simulations for real engineering systems.
• Experience using at least one major RANS-based CFD tool such as Helyx, OpenFOAM, or…