Thermal Engineer - Mountain View, CA, United States
$195,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 11 August 2026 by the employer.
This role owns the thermal design that enables our AI accelerators.
About the role
This role involves owning the thermal design for AI accelerators, from the silicon package to the system-level, taking solutions from concept through production. You will focus on building models, running simulations, designing solutions, and validating them on real hardware.
What you'll do
- Own package-level thermal design and the thermal solution that supports it.
- Own thermal validation and verification, including test plan creation, execution, and correlation between measurement and model.
- Drive hands-on thermal simulations in Ansys Icepak (or equivalent) and 1D flow network modeling (Macroflow or equivalent) for system-level analysis.
- Support system-level thermal design for datacenter applications and engage directly with vendors on thermal solution development.
What you'll need
- 5+ years of thermal design experience on advanced compute hardware, with demonstrated ownership of a thermal design from concept through production.
- Exceptional abilities in thermal design and analysis, including a strong background in heat transfer and fluid dynamics fundamentals.
- Hands-on experience with Ansys Icepak (or equivalent) for detailed CFD, and with 1D flow network tools (Macroflow or equivalent) for system-level analysis.
- Demonstrated ability to work closely with packaging, mechanical, electrical, and vendor partners to converge and validate thermal solutions.
- Experience in designing liquid cooled solutions for data center applications.
- Experience with TIM selection and characterization.
- Hands-on thermal measurement and characterization experience, including thermal test development, instrumentation, and test-to-model correlation.
This role has been open 34 days — well below the 50-day median for Hardware Systems Engineering roles.
Hardware Systems Engineering · AI ML Hardware
|
Open roles in category
964
|
Median days open
50 d
|
Median salary
$155k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | DensityAI | All employers we track in this specialty (964 roles · 103 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 5 | 964 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 10 | 6145 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 34 d | 50 d (−16 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $155k |
Who's hiring in this category
- Intel Corporation · 71 open roles · median 33 d
- KLA Corporation · 65 open roles · median 42 d
- Teradyne · 55 open roles · median 27 d
- NVIDIA · 52 open roles · median 67 d
- Applied Materials · 49 open roles · median 63 d
- AMD · 45 open roles · median 44 d
How we counted: 964 open Hardware Systems Engineering (AI ML Hardware) roles from 103 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 15 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.