Thermal Fluids Design Reliability Engineer

Vast, Long Beach, California +1

The role

Vast is looking for a Thermal Fluids Design Reliability Engineer, reporting to the Director of Design Reliability, to guide the design, verification, and validation of Haven-1, the world's first commercial human-rated space station.

As a Thermal Fluids Design Reliability Engineer, you will ensure thermal fluids systems on Haven-1 are appropriately designed and function reliably, without failure, over their intended lifespan by integrating reliability principles directly into the design process. You will drive Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), guide test plan definition and review verification & validation data, and facilitate design teams to prevent failures before manufacturing.

All jobs

Thermal Fluids Design Reliability Engineer

Vast, Long Beach, California +1

Posted pay

$162K–$265K

a year

Compared with similar jobs

This base pay is above the median for hardware and robotics jobs in other US places with no level in the job title.

Median: $146K a year
Other jobs in the group: 786

We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.

Location: Long Beach, California +1
Work type: Not given
Level: Not given
Experience: 6+ years
Skills in the job text: Python
MATLAB
Tableau
Posted: Jul 6, 2026
Last check: 53 min ago
Job type: Hardware and robotics

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Vast

Open tech jobs: 51
With posted pay: 98%
Median posted base: $121K–$196K

About Vast: funding, hiring and pay

Vast

About Vast: funding, hiring and pay

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The role

What you will do

Technical Leadership: Guide design of thermal, environmental control, and life support systems on a large scale space station.
Cultivate Vast's understanding of thermal and fluids analysis considerations to drive design decisions.
Lead the technical reviews providing clear, decisive guidance of mechanical design and analysis, manufacturing drawings, test plans, concept of operations, during milestone design reviews and major risk gates.
Provide critical peer review and approval of hardware designs during design reviews, and of acceptance and qualification test campaigns
Ensure that the Vasts design process & design criteria/requirements are being followed for flight, launch, and ground support systems.
Set the standard for acceptance and qualification test completeness for flight systems, ensuring our test campaigns are robust, disciplined, and aligned with human-rated reliability.
Bring deep engineering intuition to test campaigns, identifying risks early and helping teams converge on safe, resilient solutions.
Design Excellence: Architect Vast’s thermal fluids, environmental, and life support engineering standards, design guides, and review frameworks; build tools that enable fast, confident decision-making at all levels across the company.
Develop design criteria, requirements, and verification approaches to support haven-1 design architecture
Make engineering best practices accessible and actionable, especially for engineers moving rapidly under ambitious program timelines.
Support and elevate engineering teams across the organization by bringing broad experience in design, build cycles, integration, and test.
Turn organizational knowledge into lasting guidance by capturing lessons learned and strengthening future standards.
Process Ownership: Build and steward the processes that ensure engineering rigor at scale—ensuring designs meet standards, reviews are comprehensive, and changes are consistently implemented.
Own and continuously refine design review templates, reliability checklists, and internal design guides.
Track design maturity and compliance across the station and vehicle architecture, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.
Build tools, frameworks, and automation that empower engineers to explore design trade-offs and risks with clarity and speed.
Change and Configuration management: Work across all facets of the engineering organization to improve vehicle reliability.
Partner with configuration and change management so that every update to flight hardware is intentional, reviewed, and fully understood.
Drive technical trades for the vehicle and enable decisions backed by strong physics based engineering rational
Coordinate between Change Management, Risk, and Engineering teams to ensure design revisions drive continuous improvement on the vehicle
Partner with the internal software team to ensure system data, configuration details, and design decisions are well organized and accessible.
Risk Management: Partner with the Risk management team to identify Risk, and drive design improvements with engineering to mitigate.
Work with Risk Management and Engineering to quantify Risk and failure probability through rigorous engineering rational
Drive FMEA and Fault tree analysis across all engineering systems to identify and drive down risk
Drive best practices for traceability and verification & validation of design revisions to thoroughly document risk mitigations across flight, launch, and ground support systems.

Thermal Fluids Design Reliability Engineer

The role

Thermal Fluids Design Reliability Engineer

The role

What you will do

What you need

Minimum Qualifications

Additional Requirements

Nice to have

Pay and benefits

Pay Range: California

Compensation and benefits

About Vast

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