Member of Technical Staff - Thermal Simulation Engineer

Qualifications BS or higher in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, or a comparably rigorous technical field. 3+ years in thermal or simulation engineering; graduate research counts. Hands-on thermal or thermo-mechanical CFD/FEA in Ansys Icepak, Flotherm, Fluent, Ansys Mechanical, COMSOL, or equivalent, including a working sense of where each tool's results degrade. Practical meshing knowledge: mesh strategy, element selection, where and how to refine (interfaces, thin layers, boundary layers, high-gradient regions), and how to qualify a mesh through independence studies, convergence behavior, and quality metrics such as aspect ratio and skewness. Our meshing is automated; evaluating what it produces takes the same judgment. Ability to reason from first principles: when a result looks wrong, to determine whether the cause is the physics, the boundary conditions, the geometry, or the software. CAD fluency: opening, navigating, interrogating, and repairing real geometry in mechanical CAD, ECAD, or package layout. Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain a result and its limits to a principal thermal engineer and to a VP in the same meeting, and to build the plots and slides yourself. Preferred

Qualifications Coding experience. Python is what we use, though any real scripting background counts (MATLAB, LabVIEW, C++, OpenFOAM customization). What matters is that you write your own scripts, internal tools, and one-off analysis, including with AI coding assistants. 10+ years of thermal engineering, with shipped hardware behind it. Semiconductor packaging or high power-density electronics: chip–package–board thermal, 2.5D/3D stacks, chiplets, power maps, TIMs, warpage and reliability, cold plates, vapor chambers, liquid cooling. Customer-facing experience in applications, solutions, or field engineering, including demos, trainings, and presentations you delivered yourself. Experience validating or building a solver rather than only running one. Comfort working in Linux: command line, GPU/HPC job submission, version control.

Why Join You'll work on semiconductor and advanced packaging hardware first — AI accelerators, chiplet assemblies, high-power boards — then robotics, electric vehicles, power electronics, aerospace, and defense as those customers come on. You'll work directly with the researchers and GPU kernel engineers building the model, not through a support tier. Customers use these results for production sign-off, so validation calls carry real consequence. Location We're in Palo Alto, CA near the Caltrain station, working 2–3 days a week in person. We hire remote for the right person — members of

the team already work this way. Travel is occasional. Reports to the Founding Mechanical Engineer, who reports to the CTO.

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