Aerothermal CFD Methods Engineer

Advanced Reentry Technologies

**Who We Are:
**

Inversion is an aerospace and defense company pioneering advanced reentry technology to enable next-generation capabilities from space. By combining high-performance materials, precision aerodynamics, and mission-driven autonomy, Inversion is transforming reentry into an operational capability for an entirely new class of missions.

The company’s highly maneuverable reentry spacecraft, Arc, is designed for rapid global cargo delivery, hypersonic testing, and other national security missions that require precise, controlled flight through the atmosphere. Arc creates an entirely new transportation domain, unlocking unprecedented speed and global reach.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, Inversion designs, manufactures, and integrates its spacecraft under one roof, enabling the company to move rapidly from concept to flight. The company is backed by leading investors including Y Combinator, Spark Capital, and Lockheed Martin Ventures, with customers across the U.S. government and commercial space industry.

Position Overview:

The aerothermal environments that Inversion's vehicles fly through push beyond what off-the-shelf analysis tools can characterize. As the Staff Aerothermal CFD Methods Engineer, you will build and extend the computational tools our aerothermal team depends on developing new physics models, numeric's, and solver capabilities rather than simply applying existing ones. A meaningful portion of this work will involve developing extensions to US3D. 

Key Responsibilities: 

• Build and extend the computational tools used to characterize the aerothermal environment around reentry vehicles.
• Develop, implement, and validate extensions to existing high enthalpy flow solvers, spanning physics models, numerical methods, and solver infrastructure.
• Implement and improve models of high-temperature gas dynamics, including thermochemical non-equilibrium and finite-rate chemistry including ablation products or other additional species present in flow.
• Develop multi-phase flow modeling capability with an emphasis on droplet interactions atomization and breakup, evaporation, droplet-shock and droplet-surface interaction, and two-way coupling between dispersed and continuous phases.
• Verify and validate new capabilities against analytical solutions, ground test, and flight data.
• Work closely with production aerothermal analysts to harden new capabilities into reliable, documented tools.
• Mentor engineers across the aerothermal team.

Required Qualifications: