Nuclear Engineering, Manager

Antares • Full-time • Los Angeles, California, United States • $120k - $180k / year • 3w ago

About Us

At Antares, our long-term mission is to make clean energy abundant from Earth to the Asteroid Belt. We're fueled by the belief that advanced nuclear energy can strengthen our military, solve the climate crisis, elevate global living standards, and expand humanity's presence in outer space. To achieve our mission, we're building mass-producible, inherently safe, deployable microreactors that can be used terrestrially, underwater, and in space.

Formed in 2023, the Antares team hails from SpaceX, The White House, MIT, Rigetti Computing, The Air Force, General Atomics, Ursa Major, Ultra Safe Nuclear, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Antares has raised over $39M in venture capital from top-tier investors and has over $4M in government funding.

About the Role

We seek an experienced manager to lead our small but growing neutronics team. You will lead, build, and develop the team. You'll be directly responsible for the team's priorities, individual focus areas, and ultimate outcomes. In addition to core design and neutronics, the team will own shielding design and optimization, coupled multiphysics simulation suites, fuel specification, analysis, control systems point kinetics models, and occasionally materials and irradiation experiments.

Responsibilities

Manage and mentor the nuclear engineering team and develop their career growth.
Set and manage the nuclear engineering roadmap to integrate into business priorities.
Hire an all-star team
Step in as an individual contributor, where needed, to ensure the successful execution of priorities.
Interact cross-functionally with software engineering, control systems, mechanical engineering, and manufacturing to ensure the R1 reactor design is neutronically optimized and buildable at scale.

Basic Qualifications

At least a Bachelor's degree in engineering, physics, material science, or related field
10+ years of experience in nuclear engineering or a closely adjacent field
3-4+ years of leadership experience
Proficiency with reactor design and analysis tools, including neutronics codes like MCNP (preferred), SERPENT, OpenMC, SCALE, and NEAMS; coupled or standalone thermal hydraulics codes; CFD and FEA software, such as ANSYS, STAR-CCM+, or ABAQUS; and CAD platforms like Onshape (preferred) and Solidworks. Have run atleast one neutronics code recently and are comfortable continuing to do so.
Industry experience as well as academic/lab experience.

Preferred Skills and Experience

Strong interpersonal and collaborative skills, enthusiasm for problem solving, and desire to modernize nuclear design and operation
Master's degree or PhD in nuclear engineering
Demonstrated track record of high impact / ROI contributions
Strong project management skills and effective communication of technical concepts across multi-disciplinary teams
Broad knowledge of materials science and material selections, especially for nuclear applications
Working knowledge of a programming language, preferably Python, and experience working and co-developing with software engineers
Ability to speak publicly and represent the company externally

Additional Requirements

Ability to work long hours and weekends as necessary to support critical milestones
Willingness to work in person in Southern California

Culture

At Antares, we like to specifically tie each role to our founding document's set of values-here are the top five cultural values we think you should believe at your core to be successful:

Think in Systems - Energy and Defense are complex ecosystems with numerous stakeholders with competing priorities, conflicting policies, perverse incentives, and emergent and path-dependent properties. First principles thinking alone is insufficient. Think probabilistically and then take action. "If you want to be certain, then you are apt to be obsolete." Over-optimizing the components often degrades the system.
Obsess over the End User - The customer and end user are often not the same. We will never build globally competitive commercial products if we lose sight of our end users and their entire interaction with the product life cycle
Be Unconstrained by Convention - Our only limits are the laws of physics. Many, even experts, will say what we are working on is impossible. They said the same about SpaceX reusing rockets. Generationally impactful companies, by definition, must accomplish the seemingly impossible. If it were easy, it would have already been done. Never shy away from a solution because it has never been tried before, and never choose to do something because that's "how it's always been done."
Craftsmen - We also focus on the inputs. We aspire to high-quality engineering for its own sake. As such, we invest in personal growth, learning, and developing a long-term career path for exceptional individual contributors. We embrace a beginner's mindset, share knowledge, and never condescend the curious.
Seriously Optimistic - We're ambitious and we believe we're capable of achieving things others believe are impossible. We reward audacity, and don't let cynicism, sarcasm, snark, or belittlement influence us to lower the bar