Senior Thermal Engineer

About the Role

Uber is launching AV Labs to accelerate the autonomous technology ecosystem. We're building out a high-velocity team of multi-disciplinary experts to turn real-world operations into high-quality data for our autonomous partners. This team is focused on the hardest problem in AV today: unlocking real-world, long-tail driving data. Autonomy is now a data race—and Uber has an edge: We collect rare, real-world driving data at a scale and capital efficiency no one else can match.

As a Senior Thermal Engineer at Uber AV Labs, you will own thermal design, validation, and troubleshooting for autonomous vehicle hardware. This is a highly hands-on role working directly with sensors, compute systems, vehicle hardware, and environmental systems from prototype through production.

Core Responsibilities

• Own end to end thermal design and validation for vehicle hardware, including compute units, power electronics and sensor systems
• Design practical thermal solutions using liquid cooling, conduction, convection, heat sinks, fans/blowers, heaters, insulation, and thermal interface materials.
• Design and develop liquid cooling systems, including coolant loops, cold plates, pumps, heat exchangers/radiators, reservoirs, valves, hoses, and vehicle integration.
• Build and instrument prototypes; perform bench, thermal chamber, and vehicle testing across hot/cold environmental conditions.
• Perform thermal and fluid calculations to size cooling components and evaluate system performance.
• Use thermal/CFD simulation where appropriate and correlate models against physical test data.
• Troubleshoot thermal and cooling-system issues directly on vehicles and hardware, identify root causes, and implement corrective actions.
• Work closely with mechanical, electrical, sensor, compute, vehicle integration, and operation teams.
• Drive designs from early prototype through validation builds and release in production.

Basic Qualifications

• BS/MS in Mechanical Engineering or a related engineering discipline.
• 5+ years of thermal engineering experience, preferably in automotive, autonomous vehicles, robotics, aerospace, or high-power electronics.
• Strong hands-on experience designing, building, and validating cooling systems. Demonstrated experience with liquid cooling.
• Strong hands-on experience building, instrumenting, and testing thermal systems.
• Strong understanding of heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and electronics thermal management.
• Experience with environmental chambers and vehicle-level hot/cold testing.
• Experience with CAD (Solidworks, NX, Catia or equivalent) and mechanical design
• Comfortable working directly with prototype hardware, test equipment, and vehicles.
• Demonstrated ability to take an ambiguous thermal problem from measurement → root cause → design → validation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with thermal/CFD tools
• Automotive coolant-loop or vehicle thermal-management experience.
• Familiarity with automotive validation, reliability testing, and production design processes.

For Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $180,000 per year - USD $200,000 per year.

You will be eligible to participate in Uber's bonus program, and may be offered an equity award & other types of comp. All full-time employees are eligible to participate in a 401(k) plan. You will also be eligible for various benefits.