Pod Lead - Mechanical & Aero Engineering at Turing

Pod Lead - Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (Terminal Bench Science) | Contractor | Remote

Turing, an AI company working with leading AI labs, is looking for an experienced Mechanical or Aerospace Engineering expert to lead a pod of roughly 5-10 technical trainers. The team develops realistic, terminal-based engineering tasks for a frontier AI training and evaluation initiative. You will review tasks for technical accuracy, reproducibility and evaluation quality, mentor trainers and drive consistent delivery.

What you'll do

• Lead and mentor trainers, ensuring consistent quality, productivity and timely delivery of engineering tasks.
• Review tasks end to end: problem statements, geometry and mesh files, simulation inputs, material properties, reference solutions and automated tests.
• Validate tasks involving FEA, CFD, thermodynamics, heat transfer, dynamics, robotics, flight simulation, propulsion and orbital mechanics.
• Verify engineering correctness across units, equilibrium, conservation laws, boundary conditions, mesh convergence, solver tolerances, reference frames and numerical stability.
• Validate computational environments, simulation tools, solvers and dependencies for reproducible results.
• Review automated graders covering outputs such as stresses, deflections, natural frequencies, aerodynamic coefficients, thermal performance, orbital parameters and safety margins.
• Identify technical inaccuracies, unrealistic assumptions, incorrect tolerances and ways to bypass engineering calculations or simulations.
• Onboard trainers, allocate work, monitor quality and throughput, escalate blockers and maintain documentation and best practices.

What we're looking for

• Ph.D., postdoctoral experience, or equivalent advanced technical experience in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering or a closely related discipline.
• Strong programming skills in Python, C/C++, Fortran, Julia or MATLAB/Octave, with proficiency in Linux environments.
• Hands-on expertise in at least one major area: FEA, CFD, dynamics, flight simulation, thermal modeling, astrodynamics, GNC or propulsion modeling.
• Strong understanding of engineering simulation, numerical methods, computational modeling and technical validation.
• Experience reviewing complex technical work, simulations, computational models or research outputs.
• Experience mentoring, reviewing or leading small technical teams.
• Excellent written communication skills for precise technical feedback.

Nice to have

• Experience with tools such as OpenFOAM, SU2, CalculiX, FEniCS, FreeCAD, MuJuCo, ROS, JSBSim, OpenMDAO, poliastro, Orekit or SPICE.
• Familiarity with ANSYS, Abaqus, COMSOL or NASTRAN, including reproducing workflows with open-source tools.
• Familiarity with Docker, Git, CI/CD pipelines and automated testing.
• Experience developing or evaluating AI coding agents, terminal-based agents or LLM-generated engineering solutions.
• Industry or agency experience in automotive, energy, manufacturing, robotics, aircraft, launch vehicles, satellites or UAVs.

Contract details

• At least 4 hours per day and a minimum of 40 hours per week, with 4 hours of overlap with PST.
• Contractor assignment (no medical/paid leave).
• 4-week contract; expected start date is next week.