Job Description

Astroscale France is looking for a Thermal Engineer to join the team at Toulouse, France.

We are a fast-growing company where you can expand on your experience and develop your skills further to enable your team to deliver amazing results. Your role will help us make a difference every day by ensuring the thermal team is well placed to drive forward our missions and help to make space safer and more sustainable for future generations.

Our Thermal Engineering team plays a key role in the design, analysis, and justification of our Rendezvous, Proximity Operations, and Docking (RPOD) space systems. You will regularly collaborate with the wider engineering teams to optimize the thermal architecture, conduct thermal analyses and testing activities, and contribute thermal expertise to the overall system design and verification process.

This role will be working as a Thermal Engineer as part of the Systems Engineering Group and means you will need to be able to:

• Understand the CONOPS and system constraints driving hot and cold cases.
• Engage with sub-systems and payloads to understand thermal constraints.
• Develop and maintain thermal models to appropriate levels of detail through the project lifecycle.
• Work with structure and MCAD to trade off thermal and mechanical constraints.
• Work with the AIT team to optimise thermal test set ups for validation and verification of thermal models and designs.

This role will therefore need a candidate who can understand both the analysis and the architecture, ensuring that system design and configuration meet the thermal requirements of our missions.

🛰️ Responsibilities

• Capturing thermal requirements & constraints
• Support the development and architectural design of the Thermal Control System through thermal analyses.
• Developing thermal and geometrical models – GMM / TMM
• Managing thermal analysis packages and activities during design justification and test preparation phases.
• Execution of test campaigns; analysis of results
• Producing and reviewing reports and technical documentation
• Working with a range of internal and external stakeholders
• Working as part of project teams through the full lifecycle from feasibility studies to testing, taking part in progress meetings and reviews
• Providing thermal inputs for business development activity

🧑‍🚀 Essential Skills

• 2-5 years of commercial experience working as a thermal engineer of space systems, performing design and analysis
• Experience and knowledge of thermal analysis tools such as ESATAN-TMS / Systema Thermica
• Thorough understanding of design involvement in planning, executing and evaluating results from thermal tests
• Able to demonstrate technical leadership and work as part of a project team
• Professional level English – C1 minimum

🚀 Desirable skills

• University degree in physics, aerospace engineering or other relevant discipline,
• Knowledge of python, VBA, Matlab or batch scripting,
• Experience with CAD software such as Solidworks,
• As part of the thermal & mechanical team, you would be required to support the team depending on the opportunities. As such, experience in other engineering disciplines (mechanical, mechanisms, electrical) is a plus.

⚙️ Core competencies

• Demonstrates behaviours in line with Astroscale values (mission and people focused, transparent, innovative and pioneering, diverse and customer focused).
• Proactive, able to build working relationships, mentoring & knowledge sharing

Location

Astroscale France (Toulouse), with some hybrid working

What we offer

At Astroscale, we believe that when people feel supported, they can focus on achieving extraordinary things.

• Premium family health insurance (Mutuelle) 100% funded by the company
• 100% employer-funded disability & life insurance coverage (Pervoyance)
• Salary maintained from day one of sick leave
• Hybrid working (up to 2 days remote per week)
• Remote work allowance
• Paid child sickness leave
• Additional family and caregiving leave

About Astroscale

Astroscale is the global leader in on-orbit servicing, dedicated to the secure and sustainable development of space. The company delivers a variety of innovative and scalable on-orbit servicing solutions, including life extension, refurbishment, upgrades, in-situ space situational awareness, end-of-life, and active debris removal. Since its first successful launch in March 2021, Astroscale has proven rendezvous and proximity operations technologies in orbit during the ELSA-d and ADRAS-J missions. Astroscale spacecraft have been selected for pioneering missions with JAXA, the U.S. Space Force, the European Space Agency, the UK Space Agency, and Eutelsat. As more satellite operators adopt on-orbit servicing to routinely inspect, relocate, remove, and extend the life of spacecraft, the potential of a circular space economy — and a future of no waste in space — is being unlocked. Headquartered in Japan, Astroscale has a global presence with subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Israel. Find out more about Astroscale at www.astroscale.com.