About the Role
We are seeking a Thermal Test & Prototyping Engineer to turn new thermal-management concepts into working experiments and compelling data. This is a highly hands-on engineering role focused on designing, building, debugging, and refining thermal test platforms for electronics, including PCBs, semiconductor packages, server hardware, cooling systems, and mechanical assemblies.
You will work closely with senior technical leadership to translate well-defined concepts and simulation results into practical experiments. You will own much of the day-to-day process of making those experiments real: developing the test approach, selecting components and instrumentation, designing fixtures and test hardware, coordinating fabrication, assembling and instrumenting setups, running experiments, troubleshooting unexpected behavior, and analyzing and communicating the results.
We are looking for an engineer who enjoys building new things, figuring out why experiments don’t behave as expected, and iterating quickly until they produce useful results.
What You’ll Do
- Design and develop thermal experiments and prototype test platforms for electronics, semiconductor packages, server hardware, and cooling technologies.
- Translate thermal concepts, analytical models, and simulation results into practical physical experiments.
- Build new test setups and continuously debug, modify, and improve existing ones.
- Develop representative test vehicles and experimental analogues when testing production hardware directly is impractical or unnecessary.
- Select and integrate heaters, temperature sensors, airflow instrumentation, DAQ hardware, power supplies, electronic loads, and other test equipment as needed.
- Design mechanical fixtures, airflow structures, mounting hardware, test coupons, and other components required for experiments.
- Develop PCB-based test vehicles, heater boards, sensor boards, or other simple electronics where useful.
- Coordinate outsourced fabrication, machining, PCB manufacturing, and other external services.
- Assemble, instrument, calibrate, and operate thermal test setups.
- Diagnose unexpected experimental results by reasoning through heat-transfer mechanisms, interfaces, boundary conditions, sensor placement, parasitic heat paths, airflow, mounting conditions, and other potential causes.
- Design controlled experiments to isolate problems and validate hypotheses.
- Establish useful baselines and comparisons and evaluate repeatability and experimental uncertainty where appropriate.
- Analyze experimental data and turn results into clear plots, conclusions, and technical recommendations.
- Document test configurations and results sufficiently to make experiments reproducible and interpretable.
- Work closely with thermal, mechanical, electrical, and software engineers as needed to solve problems and accelerate test development.
- Rapidly iterate on test setups as new results generate new questions.
What We’re Looking For
- Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Approximately 2–5 years of relevant engineering experience, although exceptional candidates outside this range will be considered.
- Strong fundamentals and physical intuition in heat transfer.
- Strong hands-on experimental skills and comfort working with prototype hardware.
- Ability to take a proposed technical concept and help determine how to demonstrate it experimentally.
- Strong troubleshooting skills and the ability to systematically investigate why a test setup or prototype is behaving differently than expected.
- Comfort working in an iterative development environment where test hardware evolves quickly as results are generated.
- Ability to interpret engineering drawings, schematics, technical specifications, simulation results, and experimental data.
- Ability to communicate experimental results clearly and distinguish strong conclusions from preliminary or directional results.
- A practical engineering mindset: knowing when precision and rigor matter and when a fast experiment can answer the important question.
Particularly Valuable Experience
Candidates do not need to have all of the following. We are especially interested in people who bring strength in one or more of these areas:
- Thermal design or testing of servers, data-center hardware, GPUs, CPUs, memory, accelerators, or other high-power electronics.
- Semiconductor package thermal design or characterization.
- Server and data-center cooling architectures.
- Thermal interface materials, heat spreaders, heat sinks, cold plates, or liquid-cooling systems.
- Mechanical CAD and fixture design.
- PCB design and development of custom test vehicles.
- Hardware validation or characterization.
- Prototype development in a startup, R&D organization, or research laboratory.
- Temperature, airflow, pressure, flow-rate, power, or other physical instrumentation.
- DAQ systems and automated test equipment.
- Experimental uncertainty, calibration, repeatability, or design of experiments.
- Python, MATLAB, LabVIEW, or other tools for test automation and data analysis.
- Thermal simulation or CFD.
What Success Looks Like
Within your first several months, you will be taking thermal concepts that currently exist as ideas, calculations, or simulations and turning them into functioning experimental platforms.
You will be able to work with senior engineers to understand the physical mechanism we want to demonstrate, develop a practical way to test it, build and debug the setup, and generate data that tells us whether the concept works.
Over time, you will help expand our ability to rapidly answer questions such as:
Can we build it? Does it behave the way we expect? How much better is it? What is limiting its performance? And what experiment should we run next?
The ultimate measure of success is straightforward: more of our thermal ideas become physical prototypes, and those prototypes produce credible, compelling data that we can use to demonstrate their value to potential customers.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and performance bonuses
- Health insurance
- 401(k) with employer match
- Paid time off and holidays
- Professional development and training opportunities
Pay: $120,000.00 - $160,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- 401(k)
- Dental insurance
- Health insurance
- Life insurance
- Retirement plan
- Vision insurance
Work Location: In person
