Thermal Engineer Jobs in USA with Visa Sponsorship
Thermal engineer jobs attract strong H-1B visa sponsorship because the role qualifies as a specialty occupation requiring a bachelor's degree in mechanical or aerospace engineering. Employers in aerospace, defense, and semiconductor manufacturing file Labor Condition Applications regularly, making verified sponsorship history a practical filter when you're evaluating where to apply.
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Get Access To All JobsAbout Eridu
Eridu is a Silicon Valley-based hardware startup pioneering infrastructure solutions that accelerate AI data centers to deliver Faster AI. Today’s AI performance is frequently limited by communication bottlenecks. Eridu introduces multiple industry-first innovations across silicon, packaging, software, and systems to deliver an order of magnitude improvement in performance and unlock greater GPU utilization to speed training job completion times and tokens-per-second for more profitable inference. We do this while simultaneously reducing capital and power costs and improving reliability.
The company’s solutions and value proposition have been widely validated by leading hyperscalers.
Eridu has raised over $200M to date including its most recent, oversubscribed Series A round. The company is led by a veteran team of Silicon Valley executives who have delivered multiple billion dollar product lines and led multiple companies to billion dollar exits, including serial entrepreneur Drew Perkins, co-founder of Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN), Lightera (acq. by Ciena), Gainspeed (acq. by Nokia) and Mojo Vision (the world’s leading micro-LED company). The company is in execution mode and has a world-class engineering team with decades of experience in state-of-the-art silicon, packaging, optics, software, and systems. Eridu is working with best-in-class supply chain partners including silicon, packaging and systems.
About the role
Eridu AI is a well-funded startup in Saratoga, CA building next-generation hardware for AI data center networking. Our systems operate at power densities well beyond conventional networking equipment and rely on advanced liquid cooling.
As a Senior Thermal Engineer, you will own your thermal hardware end to end: design, development, test, release and delivery. Ownership is the core of this role. You drive your parts to closure, you don't wait to be asked, and when something slips or fails you take responsibility for fixing it. You will work closely with suppliers and manufacturing partners to make sure parts arrive on schedule and meet quality requirements.
What you'll do
- Own your thermal components and subsystems from concept to production. You are accountable for their schedule, cost and quality.
- Design and develop thermal hardware for liquid-cooled systems, including cold plates, coolant loop components and thermal interfaces.
- Run thermal and CFD analysis to validate designs and support design decisions.
- Build and execute test plans: thermal test vehicles, flow and pressure-drop testing, thermal resistance measurement and reliability testing.
- Correlate test results to models and drive design fixes to closure.
- Release designs to production: drawings, specs, BOMs and PLM release, with DFM input from suppliers.
- Manage thermal component suppliers from prototype to production: quotes, first articles, inspection and corrective actions.
- Track supplier schedules, raise risks early with a recovery plan, and follow through until builds are back on plan.
- Own quality for your parts: incoming inspection criteria, failure analysis and root-cause resolution.
- Support manufacturing partners during builds and ramp.
Required qualifications
- BS in Mechanical Engineering or related field with 8+ years of thermal engineering experience, or MS with 6+ years.
- Hands-on design of liquid cooling for high-power electronics (cold plates, loops, QDs, manifolds).
- Strong CFD and thermal modeling skills (e.g., Ansys Icepak/Fluent, FloTHERM, or Simcenter), with a track record of correlating models to test data.
- Lab experience: thermal test vehicles, instrumentation, flow loops, data acquisition.
- Working knowledge of TIMs and their failure modes (pump-out, dry-out, voiding, contact pressure).
- Experience taking hardware from concept through production release, including supplier management (quotes, first articles, corrective actions).
- A proven track record of ownership: you have taken parts or projects to production and can point to issues you drove to closure without being asked.
- Proficiency with 3D CAD (Creo or SolidWorks).
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with high-performance TIMs (e.g., liquid metal, phase change) and their qualification.
- Thermal design for very large, high-power packages (AI/HPC accelerators, 1 kW+).
- Experience with advanced attach or joining processes for thermal hardware.
- Familiarity with OCP rack and liquid cooling standards.
- Experience working with ODMs or contract manufacturers in Asia.
- MS or PhD in heat transfer or fluid mechanics.
Why Join Us?
At Eridu, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the future of AI infrastructure, working with a world-class team on groundbreaking technology that pushes the boundaries of AI performance. Your contributions will directly impact the next generation of AI infrastructure solutions, transforming the performance of AI data centers.
The starting base salary for the selected candidate will be established based on their relevant skills, experience, qualifications, work location, market trends, and the compensation of employees in comparable roles.
Notice to Recruiting Agencies
Eridu does not accept unsolicited resumes or candidate profiles from staffing agencies or third-party recruiters. Any candidate submitted to Eridu without prior written authorization from our recruiting team will be considered unsolicited and will become the property of Eridu. Eridu reserves the right to pursue and hire such candidates without any obligation to pay fees. Recruiting agencies are expressly instructed not to contact hiring managers, employees, or executives regarding open positions.
The pay range for this role is:
210,000 - 270,000 USD per year (Eridu HQ)
About Eridu
Eridu is a Silicon Valley-based hardware startup pioneering infrastructure solutions that accelerate AI data centers to deliver Faster AI. Today’s AI performance is frequently limited by communication bottlenecks. Eridu introduces multiple industry-first innovations across silicon, packaging, software, and systems to deliver an order of magnitude improvement in performance and unlock greater GPU utilization to speed training job completion times and tokens-per-second for more profitable inference. We do this while simultaneously reducing capital and power costs and improving reliability.
The company’s solutions and value proposition have been widely validated by leading hyperscalers.
Eridu has raised over $200M to date including its most recent, oversubscribed Series A round. The company is led by a veteran team of Silicon Valley executives who have delivered multiple billion dollar product lines and led multiple companies to billion dollar exits, including serial entrepreneur Drew Perkins, co-founder of Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN), Lightera (acq. by Ciena), Gainspeed (acq. by Nokia) and Mojo Vision (the world’s leading micro-LED company). The company is in execution mode and has a world-class engineering team with decades of experience in state-of-the-art silicon, packaging, optics, software, and systems. Eridu is working with best-in-class supply chain partners including silicon, packaging and systems.
About the role
Eridu AI is a well-funded startup in Saratoga, CA building next-generation hardware for AI data center networking. Our systems operate at power densities well beyond conventional networking equipment and rely on advanced liquid cooling.
As a Senior Thermal Engineer, you will own your thermal hardware end to end: design, development, test, release and delivery. Ownership is the core of this role. You drive your parts to closure, you don't wait to be asked, and when something slips or fails you take responsibility for fixing it. You will work closely with suppliers and manufacturing partners to make sure parts arrive on schedule and meet quality requirements.
What you'll do
- Own your thermal components and subsystems from concept to production. You are accountable for their schedule, cost and quality.
- Design and develop thermal hardware for liquid-cooled systems, including cold plates, coolant loop components and thermal interfaces.
- Run thermal and CFD analysis to validate designs and support design decisions.
- Build and execute test plans: thermal test vehicles, flow and pressure-drop testing, thermal resistance measurement and reliability testing.
- Correlate test results to models and drive design fixes to closure.
- Release designs to production: drawings, specs, BOMs and PLM release, with DFM input from suppliers.
- Manage thermal component suppliers from prototype to production: quotes, first articles, inspection and corrective actions.
- Track supplier schedules, raise risks early with a recovery plan, and follow through until builds are back on plan.
- Own quality for your parts: incoming inspection criteria, failure analysis and root-cause resolution.
- Support manufacturing partners during builds and ramp.
Required qualifications
- BS in Mechanical Engineering or related field with 8+ years of thermal engineering experience, or MS with 6+ years.
- Hands-on design of liquid cooling for high-power electronics (cold plates, loops, QDs, manifolds).
- Strong CFD and thermal modeling skills (e.g., Ansys Icepak/Fluent, FloTHERM, or Simcenter), with a track record of correlating models to test data.
- Lab experience: thermal test vehicles, instrumentation, flow loops, data acquisition.
- Working knowledge of TIMs and their failure modes (pump-out, dry-out, voiding, contact pressure).
- Experience taking hardware from concept through production release, including supplier management (quotes, first articles, corrective actions).
- A proven track record of ownership: you have taken parts or projects to production and can point to issues you drove to closure without being asked.
- Proficiency with 3D CAD (Creo or SolidWorks).
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with high-performance TIMs (e.g., liquid metal, phase change) and their qualification.
- Thermal design for very large, high-power packages (AI/HPC accelerators, 1 kW+).
- Experience with advanced attach or joining processes for thermal hardware.
- Familiarity with OCP rack and liquid cooling standards.
- Experience working with ODMs or contract manufacturers in Asia.
- MS or PhD in heat transfer or fluid mechanics.
Why Join Us?
At Eridu, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the future of AI infrastructure, working with a world-class team on groundbreaking technology that pushes the boundaries of AI performance. Your contributions will directly impact the next generation of AI infrastructure solutions, transforming the performance of AI data centers.
The starting base salary for the selected candidate will be established based on their relevant skills, experience, qualifications, work location, market trends, and the compensation of employees in comparable roles.
Notice to Recruiting Agencies
Eridu does not accept unsolicited resumes or candidate profiles from staffing agencies or third-party recruiters. Any candidate submitted to Eridu without prior written authorization from our recruiting team will be considered unsolicited and will become the property of Eridu. Eridu reserves the right to pursue and hire such candidates without any obligation to pay fees. Recruiting agencies are expressly instructed not to contact hiring managers, employees, or executives regarding open positions.
The pay range for this role is:
210,000 - 270,000 USD per year (Eridu HQ)
See all 90+ Thermal Engineer Jobs
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new Thermal Engineer roles.
Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding Visa Sponsorship as a Thermal Engineer
Frame your degree for specialty occupation
Your transcript needs to show a directly related field: mechanical, aerospace, or chemical engineering. A general engineering degree can work, but you'll need coursework in heat transfer, thermodynamics, or fluid mechanics to satisfy the specialty occupation requirement USCIS applies.
Target defense and semiconductor employers specifically
Aerospace primes, national labs, and chip fabrication firms file LCAs for thermal engineers far more consistently than general manufacturers. These sectors have recurring thermal management needs, so sponsorship is built into their hiring process rather than treated as an exception.
Look up prevailing wage before you negotiate
Use the OFLC Wage Search to find the Level I through Level IV wage for your metro area before any offer conversation. Your employer must pay at least the prevailing wage on the LCA, so knowing the floor protects you from offers that could later fail DOL certification.
Search verified sponsors on Migrate Mate
Migrate Mate lists employers with confirmed LCA filing history for engineering roles, searchable by city. This lets you filter your job search to companies that have already navigated the sponsorship process for roles like yours, cutting out employers who haven't yet.
Get your credentials evaluated before applying
If you completed a three-year engineering degree outside the U.S., have a NACES-member agency evaluate it for U.S. equivalency before submitting applications. Submitting an unevaluated foreign credential with an I-129 petition is a common RFE trigger for thermal and mechanical engineering roles.
Confirm the LCA is certified before you resign
DOL certifies most LCAs within seven business days, but your authorized start date depends on USCIS approving the I-129 petition afterward. Don't give notice at your current employer until the petition receipt notice is in hand, especially if you're changing status from within the U.S.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a thermal engineer role qualify for H-1B sponsorship?
Yes. Thermal engineer is a specialty occupation under USCIS criteria because it typically requires a bachelor's degree or higher in mechanical, aerospace, or chemical engineering. The role appears in DOL's occupational framework under mechanical and industrial engineering classifications, and employers routinely file H-1B petitions for it. Your offer letter should explicitly describe the degree requirement to support the petition.
Which visa types can sponsor a thermal engineer besides H-1B?
Australian nationals can use the E-3 visa, which has no lottery and a cap that has never been exhausted. Canadian and Mexican nationals may qualify under TN visa if the role maps to an engineer classification on the USMCA list. For longer-term options, EB-2 or EB-3 green card sponsorship is available through PERM labor certification, which most aerospace and semiconductor employers are familiar with filing.
How do I find employers who actively sponsor thermal engineers?
Migrate Mate shows employers with verified LCA filing history for engineering roles, organized by location. This is the fastest way to identify companies that have already sponsored roles comparable to yours, rather than cold-applying and discovering sponsorship limitations late in the process.
Does my simulation software experience affect my H-1B eligibility?
Thermal simulation expertise in tools like ANSYS Fluent, Icepak, or FloTHERM strengthens your petition by reinforcing the specialized nature of the role, but it doesn't substitute for the academic degree requirement. USCIS evaluates specialty occupation based on whether the position normally requires a directly related bachelor's degree, not on software proficiency alone. Document both in your support letter.
Can a thermal engineer self-petition for a green card without employer sponsorship?
A standard EB-2 or EB-3 green card requires employer-sponsored PERM labor certification, so self-petitioning isn't the typical path. However, if your work has national importance, an EB-2 National Interest Waiver allows self-petition without PERM. Thermal engineers working on defense applications, energy efficiency at scale, or climate-related infrastructure may have a viable NIW argument, though it requires documented evidence of impact.
What is the prevailing wage requirement for sponsored Thermal Engineer jobs?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.