About this opportunity
Powerus lists this Thermal Engineer opportunity in rock hill, South Carolina. Review the employer’s description below for duties, qualifications and application requirements.
Job description
About Powerus
Powerus is building a next-generation American autonomous systems platform designed to move, protect, and sustain critical assets in high-consequence environments. The company combines advanced autonomy, manufacturing capability, operational expertise, and strategic acquisitions to support defense, national security, critical infrastructure, and commercial operations globally.
Mission
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.
Why Join Powerus
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.
Position Overview
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.
Key Responsibilities
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
Qualifications
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, lawful permanent resident, or protected individual under 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3)); this role involves access to ITAR- and EAR-controlled technical data
Preferred Qualifications
Thermal work on UAV, aerospace, automotive, or other weight and volume constrained platforms
Electronics cooling experience, including board-level thermal design and enclosure airflow
Motor, inverter, or battery thermal management, including cooling under sustained high current
Model correlation against chamber or flight test data, and the documentation that comes with it
Familiarity with environmental test standards covering temperature, altitude, and humidity
Exposure to thermal design for sensors or optical payloads where stability matters as much as maximum temperature
What We Look For
We are looking for an engineer who respects the difference between a model and a measurement. This work rewards people who chase the missing degrees rather than adjust a boundary condition until the plot looks right, who ask what the aircraft is doing on the ramp in August before sizing a fan, and who can tell an electrical engineer plainly that a part will not survive where they want to put it. You should be comfortable owning a problem that belongs to no single subsystem and is blamed on all of them.
Equal Opportunity Statement
Powerus is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and mission-driven workforce. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
Who can apply
Review the original listing for work authorization, qualifications and employer requirements.