Mission Brief

You will be a senior technical contributor within Combustion Devices, responsible for high-fidelity combustion CFD and the physical understanding required to design, assess and mature liquid rocket engine combustion hardware. You will apply reactive-flow simulation, combustion fundamentals and test correlation to injectors, preburners, gas generators, ignition systems and main combustion chambers, ensuring that designs are performant, stable, thermally robust and ready for manufacture and hot-fire testing.

Your Role in Our Space Mission:

Own and execute CFD analyses of reacting flows in liquid rocket engine combustion devices, from model definition and meshing through solution, verification, validation and technical recommendation.
Develop and apply premixed, partially premixed and non-premixed combustion models for rocket-relevant propellant systems and operating conditions.
Perform steady and transient RANS/URANS and, where justified, scale-resolving simulations such as LES to investigate mixing, ignition, flame stabilisation, combustion efficiency and unsteady heat release.
Model injector and chamber flows including atomisation, evaporation, multiphase effects, real-gas behaviour, conjugate heat transfer and wall heat flux where relevant to the design question.
Assess combustion stability and operability, including flame dynamics, pressure oscillations, injector coupling, acoustic interaction, chugging and high-frequency instability risks.
Build robust CFD workflows in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ and Ansys Fluent, including geometry preparation, meshing strategies, solver setup, automation, post-processing and model-quality documentation.
Correlate simulations against component, cold-flow and hot-fire test data; quantify model uncertainty and clearly define the limits of predictive confidence.
Translate CFD results into practical design decisions for injectors, chambers, preburners, gas generators, igniters, cooling concepts and combustion-device interfaces.
Work closely with design, thermal, structures, materials, test, engine systems and manufacturing teams to converge combustion-device designs and resolve multidisciplinary issues.
Plan analysis and validation activities, review work from colleagues and external partners, and contribute to technical reviews, development roadmaps and risk-retirement plans.
Advance combustion modelling methods, engineering standards and reusable best practices across the Propulsion organisation.

Qualification Checklist

MSc or PhD in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, computational engineering or a comparable technical discipline.
Typically 5–10 years of professional experience in rocket propulsion, with substantial hands-on responsibility for combustion CFD and combustion-device development.
Deep knowledge of fundamental combustion physics, chemical kinetics, flame structure, turbulence–chemistry interaction, ignition and extinction phenomena.
Demonstrated experience modelling reactive premixed and non-premixed flows under rocket-engine-relevant pressure, temperature and mixture-ratio conditions.
Advanced proficiency in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ and/or Ansys Fluent for complex reacting-flow simulations; strong capability in meshing, solver selection, convergence assessment and post-processing.
Strong understanding of liquid rocket engine combustion devices, particularly injectors, preburners or gas generators, main combustion chambers, igniters and associated thermal environments.
Experience with CFD verification and validation, mesh and time-step sensitivity, uncertainty assessment and correlation to experimental or hot-fire data.
Proficiency in Python, MATLAB or a comparable language for automation, data reduction and engineering analysis.
Strong technical ownership, first-principles judgement, clear communication and professional fluency in English.

Bonus Skills

Experience with LES or other scale-resolving methods for combustion dynamics, instability and injector–chamber coupling.
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