About this opportunity
Hop Aero lists this Lead Hypersonic Re-Entry Engineer opportunity in orange county, California. Review the employer’s description below for duties, qualifications and application requirements.
Job description
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.
About the role
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.
Job Description
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
Requirements
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 challenging flows
Experience translating analytical results into vehicle-level design decisions
Understanding of reentry trajectory trades, vehicle stability, aerodynamic loading, and thermal constraints
Understanding of thermal-protection materials, insulation systems, structural heating, and thermal interfaces
Ability to plan experiments, interpret aerodynamic and thermal test data, and correlate models against real measurements
Ability to work directly with GNC, structures, propulsion, manufacturing, materials, and test teams
Willingness to be hands-on with test articles and flight hardware
Must be a US Person under ITAR - Hop Aero will not sponsor visas for this role.
Nice to have
Experience with atmospheric reentry vehicles, hypersonic vehicles, launch vehicles, missiles, or spacecraft
Experience developing reusable reentry or thermal-protection systems
Experience with arc-jet, plasma, wind-tunnel, shock-tunnel, or other high-enthalpy testing
Experience with ceramic, metallic, ablative, or composite TPS materials
Experience with coupled CFD/FEA or conjugate heat-transfer analysis
Experience developing aerodynamic or aerothermal databases across large flight envelopes
Experience with hypersonic trajectory optimization or vehicle-shape optimization
Experience taking reentry hardware from analysis through ground test and flight
Experience on DoD or U.S. Air Force high-speed flight programs
Prior experience at a fast-moving aerospace or hardware startup
What we offer
Competitive salary and meaningful stock options
Healthcare, office meals & snacks
Direct collaboration with founders & engineers with rich flight heritage
Significant technical ownership from day one
The opportunity to define the hypersonic reentry architecture of a new class of reusable vehicle
Fast upward mobility as the company grows
Even if you don’t meet every single requirement, we’d still love to hear from you. Greatness looks different in every one of us - and we need the best tackling this problem.
Who can apply
Review the original listing for work authorization, qualifications and employer requirements.