Principal Software Engineer, Vehicle Analysis (Thermal)

Turion Space • Irvine, CA

1d • $175,000 - $225,000

About The Position

Turion is developing the critical infrastructure of the space economy by building vertically integrated hardware and software: DROID, our line of space vehicles, and Starfire, our software suite covering simulation, modeling, planning, and operations. This role exists to automate the work of thermal analysts, ensuring they do not have to hand-build models, babysit solves, or paste results into reports. As a Principal Software Engineer of Vehicle Analysis, you will embed with our thermal team and turn their analysis into automated pipelines. This includes automating model generation from CAD, case matrix generation from mission definitions, parallel solves on cloud compute, and automatic production of margins, trends, and reports. You will also automate thermal vacuum test correlation and on-orbit telemetry comparison to close the loop back to reality.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, computer science, physics, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years with demonstrated technical leadership for the principal level.
• Expert-level Python for scientific computing, including numpy and the surrounding ecosystem, and strong software engineering fundamentals in version control, testing, CI/CD, and code review.
• Hands-on experience automating a commercial thermal or CAE tool through its API or scripting interface, such as OpenTD, Thermal Desktop, Ansys, Star-CCM+, or an equivalent.
• Working understanding of spacecraft thermal analysis including conduction and radiation networks, view factors, orbital environments, and thermal margin practice. You should be able to tell when a result is wrong, not just when a script fails.
• Experience orchestrating compute heavy workloads on HPC or cloud batch systems using Slurm, AWS Batch, or an equivalent.

Nice To Haves

• Thermal vacuum or thermal balance test correlation experience
• Radiation modeling and view factor computation
• Surrogate or reduced order modeling
• Prior work at a spacecraft, launch, or automotive company.

Responsibilities

• Generate models from source: Build parametric thermal model generation driven by CAD geometry and a materials and interface database, so a design change propagates into an updated thermal model without hand rework.
• Automate the case matrix: Generate and manage hot and cold case matrices across orbits, attitudes, seasons, beta angles, and operating modes, with design of experiments and sampling for trade studies.
• Run at scale: Orchestrate large batch solve campaigns on cloud and HPC compute with job scheduling, retries, caching, and cost tracking.
• Script the tools: Automate commercial thermal tools through their APIs, including Thermal Desktop and SINDA via OpenTD, Ansys, and radiation and orbital environment tools such as STK, and extend them with in-house solvers where that is faster.
• Automate the answer: Build post-processing that produces margin tables against component limits, trend plots, worst case rollups, and generated analysis reports that are ready for design review.
• Correlate to test: Ingest thermal vacuum and thermal balance test data, automate model correlation, and track correlation quality over time.
• Watch the fleet: Compare on-orbit telemetry to predictions across the fleet, flag divergence, and feed lessons back into the model library.
• Make it fast: Build surrogate models and reduced order models that give designers near-instant thermal feedback during early trades.
• Control the configuration: Put thermal models, properties, and case definitions under version control with traceability to the vehicle configuration they represent.

Benefits

• Company stock
• Equity in Turion Space
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their dependents.
• Access to a 401(k) plan with a 3% Employer Direct Contribution
• Generous vacation days, personal days, sick days, and holidays
• Paid parental leave following the birth of a newborn or adoption.
• A no-cost Employee Assistance Program (EAP) to support you and your household’s emotional health and wellbeing.
• Opportunities for ongoing internal training, workshops, and courses to advance your skills and career growth.
• Regular social events, team outings, and company-sponsored activities to foster a positive work environment.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal