Senior Aerothermal Analysis Engineer

Senior Aerothermal Analysis Engineer
Location: Playa Vista, California (in-person, five days per week)
The return lane isn’t going to build itself. Come build it with us.
Outpost is an orbital logistics company rewriting the rules of global logistics by building reusable Earth-return vehicles that unlock in-space manufacturing, on-orbit warehousing, and 60-minute global delivery through space.
Our CarryAll vehicle family returns payloads ranging from 200 kilograms to 10 metric tons, lands within 10 meters of its target, and can then be refurbished and launched again. One vehicle, many missions: responsive logistics and precision delivery for national security; commercial cargo moved with real cadence; R&D payloads flown, tested, and refined across repeatable cycles; and critical aid delivered where roads and runways can’t reach.
The demand is already here, validated through defense and civil agreements and supported by a growing pipeline of government and commercial customers.
We have the customers, the team, and a clear technical path ahead of us. We’re building the return lane. Come build it with us.
The Role
The Senior Aerothermal Analysis Engineer will own the aerothermal environments for CarryAll, combining high-fidelity CFD, engineering-level methods, and test data into the database that drives thermal protection system (TPS) sizing, structural design, and trajectory. On every return, CarryAll's deployable heatshield and structure pass through very different flow regimes as the vehicle slows from Mach 25, from rarefied upper-atmosphere flow through peak heating and down to subsonic descent. Because CarryAll is built to fly again, the environments don't just size a heatshield for one flight; they define how the thermal protection system holds up across many.
Responsibilities
Own aerothermal environment definition for CarryAll across its full flight envelope, from early trade studies through flight, and keep it current as the design evolves.
Set up and run high-enthalpy CFD at the key trajectory points that anchor the environments, capturing thermochemical non-equilibrium effects where they matter.
Bridge the gaps between CFD points with fast engineering heating methods, so every trajectory and attitude of interest has a credible answer without a full solve.
Combine CFD, engineering estimates, and ground and flight test results into a single environment product with clearly stated uncertainties and margins.
Work alongside Guidance Navigation and Control (GNC) engineers and hardware owners such as TPS, structures, and mechanism engineers to define environments that set TPS thickness, structural temperatures, and trajectory limits for flight hardware.
Add solver capability when standard tools can't capture the physics, such as custom US3D subroutines for finite-rate chemistry, ablation products, and CarryAll-specific boundary conditions.
Prove out new and existing methods against analytical cases, arc-jet and wind tunnel tests, and flight data.
Automate environment generation and delivery so updates keep pace with design iterations.
Managing and maintaining compute resources.
Qualifications
Bachelor's degree or higher in Aerospace or Mechanical Engineering.
5+ years of experience in hypersonic, supersonic, reentry, or rocketry aerothermodynamic analysis.
Experience running high-enthalpy flow solvers (FUN3D, US3D, DPLR or similar).
Experience with parallel scientific computing (e.g., MPI), high-performance computing environments, and large-scale CFD campaign automation.
Experience with handbook and engineering-level heating estimatio