Thermal Engineer - Fully Remote

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 138,000 - 165,000; Part time

Job summary

Mercor in San Francisco, CA is seeking Mechanical Engineering Experts on a contract basis. You will apply hands-on engineering to real hardware, review designs, and optimize structures, materials, thermal performance, and controls across rapid development cycles.

You will own portions of the engineering lifecycle, work with CAD/CAE, FEA, CFD, and test instrumentation, and provide clear, practical feedback to advance hardware from concept to manufacturing.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional mechanical engineering experience, including 3+ years hardware development.
• Experience as the responsible engineer for real hardware or physical systems.
• Deep expertise in structural/stress analysis and FEA, thermal analysis, mechanical design, or dynamics and controls.
• Strong knowledge of materials, loads and boundary conditions, tolerances/GD&T, reliability, manufacturability.
• Hands-on experience analyzing, testing, debugging, and validating hardware using CAD/CAE, FEA, CFD, and test instrumentation.
• Hardware development in real-world product/manufacturing environments.

Responsibilities

• Apply hands-on mechanical engineering expertise to real physical systems.
• Review and evaluate designs, analyses, simulations, and troubleshooting.
• Analyse trade-offs in structures, materials, thermal performance, dynamics, and manufacturability.
• Assess correctness and feasibility of engineering solutions.
• Identify design issues, failure modes and risks.
• Develop and review problems, reference solutions, evaluation criteria, and docs.
• Provide clear technical feedback grounded in real-world experience.

Skills

Mechanical engineering

Hardware development

Analysis and testing

Failure mode analysis

CAD/CAE

FEA

Thermal analysis

Tools

CAD/CAE

FEA

CFD/thermal simulation

Test instrumentation

Job description

About the job

Mercor connects elite creative and technical talent with leading AI research labs. Headquartered in San Francisco, our investors include Benchmark, General Catalyst, Peter Thiel, Adam D'Angelo, Larry Summers, and Jack Dorsey.

Position: Mechanical Engineering Experts
Type: Contract
Compensation: $100–$120/hour
Location: Remote

Role Responsibilities

• Apply hands-on mechanical engineering expertise to complex tasks involving real physical systems and products.
• Review and evaluate mechanical designs, engineering analyses, simulation results, and troubleshooting approaches.
• Analyse engineering trade-offs involving structures, materials, thermal performance, mechanical design, dynamics, vibration, controls, reliability, and manufacturability.
• Assess the technical correctness and feasibility of engineering solutions for real-world problems.
• Identify incorrect assumptions, design deficiencies, failure modes, and potential implementation risks.
• Develop or review engineering problems, reference solutions, evaluation criteria, and supporting documentation.
• Draw on practical experience with design, simulation, prototyping, hardware integration, test, validation, qualification, debugging, and manufacturing.
• Provide clear technical feedback grounded in real-world engineering experience and established principles.

Qualifications

Must-Have

• 5+ years of professional mechanical engineering experience, including at least 3 years of recent hands‑on experience in hardware development, analysis, testing, validation, integration, or troubleshooting.
• Experience as the responsible engineer for real hardware or physical systems, owning portions of the engineering lifecycle.
• Deep technical expertise in at least one core domain: structural/stress analysis and FEA, thermal analysis, mechanical design, or dynamics and controls.
• Strong command of materials, loads and boundary conditions, structural margins, fatigue, thermal constraints, tolerances/GD&T, component selection, reliability, manufacturability, system integration, and failure-mode analysis.
• Extensive hands‑on experience analyzing, testing, debugging, and validating physical hardware using relevant tools such as CAD/CAE, FEA, CFD/thermal simulation, and test instrumentation.
• Proven experience developing hardware in real-world product or manufacturing environments.

Preferred

• Experience working for a company that designs, builds, tests, and manufactures physical hardware products or systems.

Resources & Support

• For details about the interview process and platform information, please check: https://talent.docs.mercor.com/welcome
• For any help or support, reach out to: [e-mail]