Senior Structural Engineer - Simulation

About the Company

We are a renewable energy and ocean technology company committed to rapidly developing and deploying technologies that will ensure a sustainable future for Earth by unlocking the vast energy potential of its oceans. Our focus is on capturing civilizational levels of ultra-low-cost renewable energy for applications including computing and affordable renewable fuels delivered to shore.

The company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and backed by leading venture capitalists, philanthropic investors, university endowments, and private investment offices. We operate as an idea meritocracy in which the best ideas change the company’s direction on a regular basis.

About the Job

We are developing a core technology that will operate in the worst conditions the world’s oceans have to offer for years at a time without human maintenance or intervention. As a Senior Structural Engineer - Simulation, you will be the architect of the digital tools that define our physical success. You will sit at the intersection of structural mechanics and high-performance computing, developing the solvers and automation pipelines that allow us to evaluate millions of design possibilities with physics-backed confidence.

You will lead the development of our internal Julia-based reduced order structural models (ROM) and the pipelines connecting these fast solvers with high-fidelity FEA.

We expect you to be an expert in structural fundamentals who is equally comfortable writing production-grade code, managing cloud-based compute environments, and validating complex load cases against first principles.

Candidates should have strong interpersonal skills and be able to thrive in a creative, scrappy, and collaborative environment in which the best ideas change the company’s direction on a regular basis. If you are an excellent engineer, regardless of your background, we want you to apply. Our staff have worked at organizations such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, Virgin Orbit, Virgin Galactic, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, New Relic, Raytheon, Disney Imagineering, Bridgewater Associates, and the US Army and Air Force, as well as research universities, startups, and small companies across a range of industries. We are organized as a public benefit corporation and are backed by leading venture capital firms, private investors, philanthropic investors, and endowments. 

We strive to be the best engineering team on the planet and we compensate our engineers accordingly. 

Responsibilities

• Maintain and advance our reduced-order beam element analysis tool written in Julia. Author new load cases, fix bugs, and optimize performance.
• Build and maintain seamless automation pipelines that transition designs from reduced-order models to high-fidelity FEA shell element models.
• Collaborate with Marine Ops, Manufacturing, and ME teams to define and analyze critical load environments, including wave slamming, tow loads, crane lifts, and fatigue.
• Own the mass estimation process for candidate devices, providing high-accuracy tracking as we iterate through new design concepts.
• Verify automated results using classical hand calculations and perform FEA in Nastran to validate the accuracy of reduced-order outputs.
• Leverage Docker, GCP, and PostgreSQL/Python to manage large-scale simulation data and cloud-based compute workloads.
• Act as the structural simulation lead for novel primary structures, ensuring designs are well-understood from a structural perspective even when conceptual in their maturity.

Required qualifications

• An undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering, Structural Engineering, or equivalent experience and expertise.
• 3+ years of experience in a role involving both structural analysis and software/tooling development.
• Proven experience writing clean, maintainable code in Julia and Python.
• Deep fundamental understanding of structures - preferably large-scale steel structures
• Familiarity with marine-specific load environments (hydrodynamics, mooring, or offshore structures).
• Experience with Git, Docker, and cloud computing environments (GCP/AWS/Azure).
• Working knowledge of Nastran or similar solvers for validating structural models.
• Ability to use AI for code generation and efficiency while maintaining the technical intuition to