Team Lead - Thermofluids AnalysisActive

Rocket Lab
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The opportunity

Rocket Lab is the end-to-end space company building rockets, spacecraft, and critical subsystems that keep the world connected, protected, expand humanity’s reach to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. We move fast, build real hardware for meaningful missions, and make the impossible routine.

What you'll do

  • Leadership & Team Development Manage, mentor, and develop your direct: reports—providing coaching, timely feedback, and professional development opportunities while identifying skills gaps to drive cross-functional training

  • Ensure the successful delivery of key strategic engineering projects,: negotiating resource and priority across the organization

  • Provide regular project status updates, conduct peer reviews, and produce: qualification test levels through consistent application of approved margining approaches

  • Aeroscience Generate aerotables and characterise vehicle: performance—covering stability, control authority, loads, pressure distributions, and aerodynamic design of vehicle control surfaces

  • Perform, validate, and document CFD analyses of external flow across: hypersonic, transonic and subsonic regimes, and characterise aerodynamic and heating environments, transients, and separation events

  • Model plumes and plume interactions (base heating, PIFS, impingement) and: define re-entry architecture, including ballistic coefficients, ConOps, and compartment venting

What they're looking for

  • Thermal Own system thermal design across ground, flight, and in-space: operations, including TPS response, compartment thermals, insulation, and component thermal modelling
  • Perform heat transfer simulations (conduction, convection, radiation) and: characterise thermal environments, developing design guidelines and mitigations
  • Model HVAC and cavity conditioning (flow/temperature specification, pressure: drop, flammability, cleanliness, humidity) and support payload integration and customer ITAs
  • Propellant Own propellant delivery and management—covering temperatures and: stratification, cavitation margin, transients, slosh, PMD design, settling, and in-space thermodynamics—and perform CFD of internal fluid systems (compressible and incompressible flow)