Senior Engine Cycle Engineer (m/f/d)

Responsibilities

We are representing a confidential aerospace organization seeking a Senior Engine Cycle Engineer to own the engine cycle and top-level technical architecture of a pump-fed liquid rocket engine. You will translate mission and vehicle requirements into integrated engine designs, establish key performance trade-offs, and ensure every major subsystem converges on a coherent, testable, and manufacturable solution.

Your core responsibilities include:

• Building, maintaining, and validating engine cycle models across nominal, throttled, and off-nominal operating conditions, including start-up and shutdown transients
• Leading cycle trade studies and sensitivity analyses to optimize performance and identify design drivers, constraints, and technical risks
• Performing top-level engine sizing and defining principal operating points and component interface conditions
• Driving architecture and design trade-offs across combustion devices, turbomachinery, valves, feed systems, ignition, controls, structures, thermal management, and engine layout
• Owning top-level engine requirements, assumptions, interface definitions, and technical budgets
• Acting as the technical decision driver for cross-functional design issues, keeping decisions documented, traceable, and backed by analysis and test evidence
• Owning the technical development roadmap and timeline: guiding design iterations, prioritizing maturation activities, and defining analyses, breadboards, and tests that retire the highest risks
• Coordinating technical reviews and providing clear recommendations to propulsion leadership and program teams

What We're Looking For

Required qualifications:

• MSc in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, or comparable technical discipline, or equivalent professional experience
• Several years of experience in liquid rocket engine development, with direct responsibility for engine cycle analysis, engine architecture, or propulsion system integration
• Hands-on experience with high-pressure, pump-fed liquid rocket engine cycles: designing, analyzing, developing, or testing them
• Excellent understanding of engine cycles, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and turbomachinery power balance
• Proven experience with steady-state cycle modeling, top-level engine sizing, and performance prediction
• Experience planning and coordinating multidisciplinary engine development or test campaigns and driving technical roadmaps to agreed timelines
• Proficiency in Python, MATLAB, or comparable programming language
• Strong technical ownership and systems thinking, with confidence to make decisions with incomplete information
• Fluent in English
• Willingness to travel occasionally for test and launch operations

Bonus qualifications:

• Experience with transient cycle modeling: start-up, shutdown, throttling, and off-nominal conditions
• Experience taking an engine design from cycle definition and system-level trades into hardware and test
• Experience analyzing engine control, operability, stability, or failure cases
• Sufficient breadth across valves, feed systems, ignition, controls, structures, and thermal management to arbitrate trade-offs between disciplines
• Experience correlating models against hot-fire test data

How We Work With You

Our talent team at Get A Job.ai partners with leading organizations to connect exceptional candidates with career-defining opportunities. When you apply through our platform, a dedicated recruiter will screen your application and guide you through the process. If there's a strong match, we will submit your profile to our client for consideration. Please do not contact the client directly—all communication will be managed through Get A Job.ai to ensure a professional and streamlined experience.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process with our recruiting team.

Equal Employment Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is committed to fair and inclusive recruiting practices. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and do not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, nationality, age, disability, or any other protected characteristic.