Karman Industries
Karman Industries is a Torrance-based thermal technology company building the backbone for giga-scale AI infrastructure. Founded by a team from SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and GE, Karman is moving beyond legacy cooling with the launch of the HPU (Heat Processing Unit) - a new category of thermal architecture designed for the 100kW+ rack era.
The HPU shrinks the exterior mechanical yard by up to 80% while reducing peak energy consumption by 10%+. Unlike traditional systems, the Karman HPU provides zero-water (WUE 0) cooling that ensures high-TDP GPUs and HBM4 memory stay at optimal thermal setpoints without throttling.
Founded in 2024, we’re a fast-growing team of passionate professionals dedicated to making a tangible impact on the future of humanity. We design, build, and test real hardware, and we lead with ownership: you’ll own your work from concept to hardware and help shape how we scale. Our values are Ownership, Performance Excellence, Radical Transparency, and Customer-Centricity.
Join us in our mission to transform the industry and contribute to a more sustainable world.
Senior Dynamics & Controls Engineer
Karman Industries is seeking a highly skilled system dynamics and controls engineer to join our talented engineering team. This is not an industrial automation or PLC/SCADA-based controls role - we are looking for someone who can derive the governing differential equations of a physical system from first principles, analyze that system's dynamic behavior, and design robust control algorithms around it.
Responsibilities:
- Derive equations of motion and governing dynamics for physical systems from first principles
- Analyze system dynamics, including stability, controllability/observability, frequency response, and nonlinear behavior
- Design and validate robust control algorithms
- Build high-fidelity, physics-based models in Simulink/Simscape to validate control designs
- Collaborate with hardware and systems engineers to translate control designs into implementable algorithms
- Document modeling assumptions, derivations, and validation results
Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in aerospace, mechanical, or electrical engineering (M.S. or Ph.D. preferred)
- 5-7 years of experience deriving and analyzing dynamic system equations and designing control algorithms
- Strong first-principles derivation skills - comfortable building models from physics, not just tuning existing controllers
- Proficiency with MATLAB/Simulink and Simscape for physics-based modeling
- Solid grounding in control theory (classical and modern: state-space, frequency domain, stability analysis)
Skills & Attributes:
- Background in GNC, robotics, mechatronics, power electronics/grid dynamics, or another deeply dynamics-driven field
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a first-principles physics-based approach
- Experience with nonlinear, optimal, or adaptive control techniques
- Familiarity with hardware-in-the-loop testing or real-time control implementation
- Excellent communication skills and ability to work cross-functionally
Karman Industries is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Karman Industries is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.