Senior CFD Modeling Engineer — Gas Flow & Heat Transfer

Socket.dev; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Mainspring Energy is seeking a CFD Modeling Engineer to support the design, testing, and manufacture of our linear generators. You will perform detailed fluid dynamic and thermochemical analyses to refine designs and inform lower-order models that describe system behavior.

You will write code in C++ and Python to automate CFD execution, manage resources, run simulations, and communicate results to engineers, leadership, and partners.

Qualifications

• Graduate-level engineering degree with 10+ years in CFD and foundational theory.
• 2+ years using at least one CFD package and one CAD package.
• Experience generating and validating multi-fidelity models (0D-3D) in programming languages (C/C++, Python, etc).

Responsibilities

• Run CFD simulations to analyze transient gas flow, kinetics, and heat transfer.
• Manage computational resources on local hardware and in the cloud (AWS / GCP).
• Collaborate with mechanical engineers to create 3D CAD models from CAD tools for mesh generation.
• Extract fluid volumes for analysis; refine and debug mesh for stable simulations.
• Choose boundary conditions and domain models for CFD studies.
• Guide solver runs to convergence and diagnose crashes or roadblocks.
• Distill 3D results for stakeholders; create images/videos highlighting key phenomena.
• Explain CFD principles and model choices to the team.
• Develop test plans to validate CFD observations and supply required boundary conditions.
• Analyze test data vs CFD and system simulations.
• Create lower-order models for system-level simulations; run to assess design impact.
• Write C++/Python to automate CFD workflows and couple models with CFD boundaries.
• Participate in peer reviews of modeling software and methods.
• Document simulation results for diverse audiences.

Skills

CFD modeling

Programming in C++/Python

Education

Graduate-level engineering degree

Tools

Fluent/Star-CCM/Converge CFD packages

Solidworks/Catia CAD

Job description

Mainspring Energy is seeking a CFD Modeling Engineer to support the design, testing, and manufacture of our linear generators. You will perform detailed fluid dynamic and thermochemical analyses to refine designs and inform lower-order models that describe system behavior.

You will write code in C++ and Python to automate CFD execution, manage resources, run simulations, and communicate results to engineers, leadership, and partners.