Staff Thermal Systems Integration Engineer

Roboticsconnected; Mountain View (WY); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Rhoda AI seeks a Staff Thermal Systems Integration Engineer to own the thermal management across its robot platform. You will define thermal requirements, develop system-level architectures, and validate designs through simulations and tests across diverse environments.

This cross-functional role collaborates with Hardware, Software, Controls, Safety, and Product teams to ensure reliability, uptime, and safe operation of thermal solutions in real-world scenarios.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of thermal systems analysis experience.
• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering or related discipline.
• Hands-on experience with thermal simulation tools.
• Ability to decompose system-level thermal requirements into components.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration with Hardware, Controls, Safety, and Product teams.

Responsibilities

• Develop system-level thermal requirements and decompose to subsystems and components; own thermal management of the entire robot platform.
• Create detailed thermal simulations to validate designs; lead thermal verification across operating environments.
• Collaborate with Control Engineers to develop thermal management algorithms and shutdown strategies.
• Validate subsystem and robot-level thermal performance; document specifications, analyses, and test plans for traceability.
• Provide guidance on thermal design principles and best practices across the organization.

Skills

Systems thinking

Thermal modeling

Thermal simulations

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering

Tools

ANSYS Fluent

COMSOL

OpenFOAM

MATLAB/Simulink

Python

Job description

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality.

THE ROLE

We're looking for a Staff Thermal Systems Integration Engineer to own thermal management across our entire robot platform. This role spans system-level thermal architecture, detailed thermal modeling and simulation, integration with mechanical design, coordination with controls on thermal management strategies, and validation across diverse operating environments. You'll work at the intersection of hardware design, control systems, and safety—defining thermal requirements, ensuring cooling solutions are architected correctly, and proving through simulation and test that the system meets reliability and uptime targets. This is a highly cross-functional role requiring deep collaboration with Hardware, Software, Controls, Systems Integration, Safety, and Product teams.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Develop system-level thermal requirements and decompose to subsystems and components; own thermal management of the entire robot platform including all cooling devices, thermal paths, and heat dissipation strategies.
• Partner with Hardware sub-teams (structures, actuators, electrical) from design review and release, ensuring thermal requirements are met in implementation and cooling device placement and sizing are optimized.
• Create detailed thermal simulations (including computational fluid dynamics where appropriate) to validate designs; lead thermal verification across diverse operating environments and use cases against reliability and uptime targets.
• Collaborate with Control Engineers to develop thermal management algorithms, derating, and shutdown strategies; work with Safety Engineers to integrate thermal constraints into system safety analyses and ensure correct behavior implementation.
• Validate subsystem and robot-level thermal performance, documenting thermal specifications, analyses, simulation results, and verification test plans for regulatory and design review traceability.
• Provide technical guidance on thermal design principles, best practices, and lessons learned to support the organization in thermally sound decision-making.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• At least 10 years of related experience of thermal systems analysis, including heat transfer principles, thermal modeling, and cooling device design and selection.
• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, or closely related engineering discipline.
• Hands-on experience with thermal simulation tools for simulating heat loading and validating the impact of cooling devices and thermal management strategies.
• Strong systems-thinking: ability to reason across mechanical, electrical, and control layers to identify thermal constraints and optimize integrated thermal solutions.
• Experience decomposing system-level thermal requirements into component and subsystem specifications.
• Proven ability to work cross-functionally with Hardware, Controls, Safety, and Product teams to drive alignment on thermal architecture and constraints.
• Strong troubleshooting and root-cause analysis instincts for thermal issues—you follow the evidence and push until you understand the real problem.
• Excellent communication skills; comfortable engaging Hardware, Controls, Safety, Systems Integration, and Product stakeholders as peers and translating between disciplines.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with mainstream CFD tools (ANSYS Fluent, COMSOL, OpenFOAM, or similar) and advanced thermal simulation techniques.
• Proficiency in MATLAB / Simulink for thermal modeling, control algorithm development, or co-simulation environments.
• Experience with Python for thermal data analysis, automation, or custom tooling.