Engineering Intern, Simulation and Technical Sales

M4 Engineering's Shakopee technical center is where structural analysis, CFD and thermal work, optimization and software development all land on the same programs. We work for the Department of Defense, NASA, and commercial customers on flight hardware for fighter jets, launch vehicles, spacecraft and next-generation air mobility.

We are looking for organized, enthusiastic engineers to join the team in Shakopee and work on those programs alongside the engineers running them. The people who do well here are curious about more than one discipline, careful enough to check their own numbers, and comfortable explaining what they found to someone who is going to act on it.

Paid internship opportunities are available in the following areas:

Structural analysis

• Sizing structure against flight, gust, landing and vibration loads, from concept layout through the detailed design that has to show positive margins at certification
• Material and concept trades on composite and metallic structure, where your numbers decide what actually gets built
• Modal and forced response for hardware that has to survive a real operating environment
• Finite element work in Simcenter 3D, FEMAP, Abaqus and ANSYS, with hand calculations alongside, because a margin you cannot check by hand is a margin you do not trust

Thermal and fluids

• External aerodynamics and internal flow in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ and FloEFD
• Conjugate heat transfer on propulsion hardware, and cooling for electronics that have to keep working at altitude or under sustained load
• Carrying flow and thermal results back into the structural model, so hardware is sized for the loads it actually sees rather than the ones we assumed

Optimization and engineering software

• In-house optimization and multidisciplinary analysis tools in Python, the kind that size a whole vehicle rather than a single part
• Design studies in HEEDS and Altair HyperWorks
• Automating the model build so a configuration change can be resized in hours instead of weeks
• Correlating the tools against wind tunnel and structural test data, so we know they predict what the hardware actually does

Technical sales

• Demonstrating and benchmarking the Siemens tools we resell, including NX, Simcenter, Teamcenter and Fibersim
• Building example models that show a customer the workflow on a problem they already recognize, whether that is an airframe, a turbine or an enclosure
• Helping answer the technical questions that come up during an evaluation
• Seeing how engineering decisions get made on the customer's side of the table

What we are looking for

• A degree, or progress toward one, in aerospace, mechanical, or structural engineering, or a closely related field
• Some exposure to finite element or CFD work, whether from coursework, a project team, or prior experience
• Comfort writing code. Python is what we use most, though FORTRAN, C/C++ and MATLAB all show up
• The ability to explain your reasoning clearly in writing and out loud, because you will present your own work
• U.S. Citizenship or lawful permanent residency, which our programs require

Practical details

• Onsite in Shakopee, Minnesota. This is not a remote internship
• Year round, full-time or part-time
• Paid hourly