Thermal Engineer for Actuator Cooling

Dexmate • Fremont, CA

4d

About The Position

Dexmate is seeking a Thermal Engineer to develop cooling solutions for compact robot actuators, focusing on liquid cooling. The engineer will own thermal models and cooling-system design and validate them on working hardware. The role works across motor, drive, and mechanical design to sustain actuator performance over realistic robot duty cycles.

Requirements

• Hands-on thermal design and test experience with liquid-cooled electromechanical or power-electronics systems.
• Strong fundamentals in heat transfer, fluid mechanics, pressure-drop analysis, and thermal resistance networks.
• Experience with conjugate heat-transfer or CFD tools such as Ansys Fluent, Star-CCM+, or equivalent, plus thermal-network modeling and experimental correlation.
• Ability to design practical cooling hardware and use thermocouples, flow and pressure measurements, or equivalent instrumentation to validate it.

Nice To Haves

• Experience cooling motors, EV batteries, inverters, servo drives, or compact robot joints.
• Experience with moving coolant lines, compact sealing interfaces, leak testing, or coolant material compatibility.
• Experience with Motor-CAD thermal or equivalent reduced-order models, thermal test automation, or manufacturing processes for cooling components.

Responsibilities

• Translate motor and inverter losses and robot duty cycles into thermal requirements, boundary conditions, and operating limits.
• Develop conjugate heat-transfer and CFD models alongside reduced-order thermal models, and correlate them to instrumented hardware.
• Design cold plates, stator jackets, and heat paths; specify coolant flow, pressure drop, pump operating points, and system heat-rejection needs.
• Develop coolant routing through moving joints with mechanical engineers, accounting for motion, serviceability, sealing, compatibility, and leakage risks.
• Plan and run thermal characterization across ambient conditions and transient duty cycles; diagnose hot spots and validate design changes.
• Provide measured thermal limits and model inputs to drive and firmware engineers for derating behavior; support supplier and manufacturing validation.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: No Education Listed