Fluids Analyst

About the role

Cowboy Space Corp. is building the infrastructure to power and connect the orbital economy. Our satellites operate in Low Earth Orbit to collect sunlight and enable a new class of capabilities—from powering on-orbit compute, to transmitting energy via infrared lasers (space-to-earth and space-to-space), to delivering secure, high-bandwidth optical data. By rethinking how energy and data are generated and distributed in space, we’re unlocking entirely new ways to operate both in orbit and on Earth.

Responsibilities

• Own the full lifecycle of fluids prediction and data for the team — from first-order sizing models through correlated, test-anchored models used for flight.
• Build and maintain 1D fluid network and transient system models of engine and vehicle fluid systems to predict pressure drop, flow capability, and thermal performance.
• Perform early-phase simulation and trade studies to inform architecture selection, line and orifice sizing, valve and regulator selection, and pressurization schedules before hardware is committed.
• Predict flow capability and pressure budgets across the system: line and fitting losses, flow distribution and manifold balance, cavitation and choked-flow margin, NPSH, and engine inlet conditions.
• Analyze transient behavior — water hammer, priming and chill-in, valve sequencing, blowdown and ullage collapse, tank pressurization and thermal stratification.
• Perform CFD analysis of valves, manifolds, and other internal-flow components to resolve loss coefficients, flow distribution, and local behavior that lumped models cannot capture.
• Define the instrumentation and measurement requirements needed to validate your models — specify what gets measured, where, at what rate, and to what accuracy.
• Support component-level and system-level test campaigns: write analysis-driven test objectives and predictions and set red lines and expected values.
• Own reduction and analytics of fluids test data — build the data pipelines, automate processing across runs, quantify uncertainty, and turn raw channels into engineering quantities.
• Correlate models against test and flight data, quantify model error, and drive the updates that improve predictive accuracy over time.
• Establish and maintain the team's analysis methods, model libraries, fluid property data, and validation standards so results are repeatable and reviewable.
• Communicate analysis results and their uncertainty clearly to designers, test engineers, and leadership, and document methods, assumptions, and conclusions in review-ready form.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Chemical Engineering, or related field.
• 5+ years of experience performing fluid system analysis for flight vehicles, propulsion systems, or other high-performance hardware.
• Strong fundamentals in fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and heat transfer, including compressible flow, two-phase flow, and transient system behavior.
• Experience building 1D fluid network or transient system models with tools such as Flownex, AFT (Fathom/Arrow/Impulse), EASY5, GFSSP, Simulink, or equivalent in-house codes.
• Hands-on experience with commercial or open-source CFD (ANSYS Fluent, Siemens STAR-CCM+, or OpenFOAM) applied to internal flow problems.
• Proficiency with Python (NumPy, pandas) or MATLAB for model development, data reduction, and automation of analysis workflows.
• Experience reducing and interpreting real test data, including correlating analytical predictions against measurements.
• Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.