Thermal Engineer

Our mission is to deliver resilient autonomous technologies that strengthen national security, improve operational safety, and expand the capabilities of organizations operating in complex environments.

Heat is what an unmanned aircraft cannot throw away easily. There is little airflow to spare, little mass to sink into, and every watt that a processor, an inverter, or a sensor turns into heat has to leave the vehicle through a surface that was sized for something else. As Powerus fields denser electronics on longer missions and in hotter places, thermal stops being a late check on a design and becomes one of the constraints that sets it.

This role owns that constraint across the vehicle. You will build the thermal picture for avionics, propulsion, and payloads, decide where heat goes and how it gets there, and then prove it with instrumented hardware in a chamber and in flight. It is a seat where a modeling assumption you make in week one is either confirmed or embarrassed by a thermocouple a few months later.

Thermal behavior at Powerus cuts across every discipline, and this role is the one that owns it end to end. This position requires U.S. Person status, as the work involves access to export-controlled technical data. You will build thermal and airflow models of avionics enclosures, motors and power electronics, and payload assemblies, set heat rejection strategy for each, and design the cooling paths, heat sinks, interfaces, and ducting that carry it out.

You will work with avionics, power, payload, airframe, and test engineering, and you will validate your own models against chamber and flight data rather than handing them off.

• Build steady-state and transient thermal models of avionics, propulsion, power electronics, and payload assemblies, and keep them current as the designs move
• Perform computational fluid dynamics and airflow analysis for enclosures, cooling passages, inlets, and exhaust paths
• Define heat rejection strategy for each subsystem, choosing between conduction paths, forced or natural convection, heat spreading, and mounting interface design
• Specify heat sinks, thermal interface materials, fans and ducting, and coordinate their fit and mass impact with mechanical and airframe design
• Set component temperature limits and derating guidance with electrical and avionics engineers, and track thermal margin as a managed budget
• Analyze environmental and altitude effects on cooling, including reduced air density, ambient extremes, solar load, and ground operation before takeoff
• Plan and run thermal testing - thermocouple and imaging instrumentation, chamber runs, bench soak and mission-profile tests, and in-flight temperature capture
• Correlate models against measured data, close the gap between predicted and observed behavior, and document the assumptions that survived
• Support thermal troubleshooting on prototypes and production units, from a hot part on a bench to a temperature-driven fault in the field

• Must be located in the United States, within commuting distance of Rock Hill, SC, and able to work on-site
• Degree in mechanical or aerospace engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience performing thermal analysis of hardware, including modeling and the hand calculations that sanity-check it
• Working understanding of conduction, convection, and radiation as they apply to electronics and machinery in real packaging
• Familiarity with computational fluid dynamics or thermal simulation tools and the limits of what their results mean
• Hands-on test experience - placing instrumentation, running a thermal test, and reading the data honestly
• U.S. Person status required (U.S. citizen,…