Maritime CFD Engineer — Hull Hydrodynamics & AI-Simulation

📍 San Francisco | 🏢 5 Days Onsite

Location:

Onsite in San Francisco

Compensation:
Competitive Salary + Equity

Engineering simulation is one of the last major categories of software that AI hasn't rebuilt. The tools used to design aircraft, ships, reservoirs, and medical devices still run on numerical methods that are decades old, and an engineer can wait a full day for a single answer. UniversalAGI is building foundation models that learn physics directly from data, and they are already running in early deployments on real computational fluid dynamics and reservoir engineering problems for some of the largest industrial and defense organizations in the world.

We are a team of 25 researchers and engineers in San Francisco backed by Elad Gil (#1 Solo VC), Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO), Prith Banerjee (ANSYS CTO), Ion Stoica (Databricks Founder), Jared Kushner (former Senior Advisor to the President), David Patterson (Turing Award Winner), and Luis Videgaray (former Foreign and Finance Minister of Mexico).

As a Maritime Hydrodynamics CFD Engineer, you'll be in the arena from day one, building the future of AI for physics simulation with your own hands. This is your chance to take everything you've learned in ship hydrodynamics and marine engineering and use it to build foundation AI models that will transform how the entire industry works.

You'll work directly with the CEO and founding team to shape our product around the real pain points you've faced in your career: the complex hull form optimization, the challenging free surface modeling, the tedious seakeeping analyses, the endless resistance and propulsion studies.

• Design, preprocess, mesh, simulate, and post-process hydrodynamics for maritime hull designs at unprecedented scale and speed

• Come up with creative ways to design, mesh, and simulate hundreds or thousands of hull geometries systematically, building the data pipelines that will train our foundation models

• Guide the development of our product and our revolutionary new AI models for physics by working directly on research problems with our AI team, bridging the gap between traditional CFD and cutting-edge ML

• Work directly with clients to solve their problems and define benchmark datasets, validation criteria, and workflows that prove our models can match or exceed traditional simulation accuracy

• Generate high-quality simulation data at scale, every simulation you run directly improves our foundation models

• Advise the AI research team on the nuances that matter: free surface modeling (VOF, level-set), wave dynamics, resistance components (viscous, wave-making, form), appendage effects, propeller-hull interaction, seakeeping, maneuvering, multiphase flow considerations

• Lead technical customer conversations with customers and internal teams,translating between the world of marine CFD and the world of AI

This is a role for someone who's ready to solve some of humanity's hardest problems, push past the limitations of traditional CFD, and build something that will define the next generation of industrial engineering.

• 3+ years of industry hands-on experience in hydrodynamics CFD simulation in maritime industries. Including preprocessing, simulation, post-processing, and design.

• Expert in solver frameworks (STAR-CCM+, FINE/Marine, OpenFOAM, ORCA, or similar).

• Deep understanding of ship hydrodynamics, hull form design, free surface flows, meshing strategies, boundary conditions, and numerical methods.

• Solid understanding on parameterizing CAD to generate different variants of geometry

• Strong communicator capable of bridging customers, engineering and research teams.

• Outstanding execution velocity and delivery.

• Exceptional creativity, problem-solving ability, ambition, and attention to detail.

• Comfortable working in high-intensity, fast-paced startup environments with evolving priorities and tight deadlines.

• Prior experience integrating AI/ML models into simulation pipelines.

• Industry experience in CFD simulation in aerospace or domains outside maritime.

• Industry experience in maritime for related disciplines:seakeeping, maneuvering simulations, propeller design, cavitation analysis, structural hydrodynamics, offshore structures, autonomous surface vessels.

• Familiarity with naval architecture workflows and tools used by companies like Saronic and other maritime defense/autonomy companies.

• Experience at high-growth AI startups (Seed to Series C).

• Forward deployed…