Senior Engine Cycle Engineer

Senior Engine Cycle Engineer

Isar Aerospace

Parsdorf, Germany

Mission Brief

You will own the engine cycle and the top level technical architecture of a pump fed liquid rocket engine. As the responsible engineer you translate mission and vehicle needs into an integrated engine design, establish the key performance trades, and make sure every major sub system converges on one coherent, testable and manufacturable solution.

Your Role in Our Space Mission:

• Build, maintain and validate engine cycle models across nominal, throttled and off nominal operating conditions, including start up and shutdown transients.
• Lead cycle trade studies and sensitivity analyses to optimise performance and identify design drivers, constraints and technical risks.
• Perform top level engine sizing and define the principal operating points and component interface conditions.
• Drive architecture and design trade offs across combustion devices, turbomachinery, valves, feed systems, ignition, controls, structures, thermal management and engine layout.
• Own the top level engine requirements, assumptions, interface definitions and technical budgets.
• Act as the technical decision driver for cross functional design issues, and keep decisions documented, traceable and backed by analysis and test evidence.
• Own the technical development roadmap and timeline: guide design iterations, prioritise maturation activities, and define the analyses, breadboards and tests that retire the highest risks.
• Coordinate technical reviews and give clear recommendations to Propulsion leadership and to the programme and vehicle teams.

Qualification Checklist

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

Bonus Skills:

• Experience with transient cycle modelling: 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 analysing engine control, operability, stability or failure cases.
• Enough breadth across valves, feed systems, ignition, controls, structures and thermal management to arbitrate trade offs between those disciplines.
• Experience correlating models against hot fire test data.