Reliability Engineer II-Senior

The posting, as Antares wrote it

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.

The Antares team hails from SpaceX, the White House, the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, MIT, Rigetti Computing, General Atomics, Relativity Space, Ursa Major, and National Laboratories like Idaho, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Savannah River. Antares has raised over $600M in venture capital from top-tier investors and has hundreds of million-dollars on contract with the military services, NASA, and the Department of Energy.

Roles & Responsibilities

• Own quantitative reliability analysis for the Antares R1 microreactor, including development and maintenance of reactor and plant level reliability, availability, and capacity factor models.
• Establish reliability targets for reactor systems, subsystems, and critical components based on overall plant capacity factor, regulatory and mission requirements.
• Translate top-level reactor availability and capacity factor goals into measurable reliability requirements for individual mechanical, electrical, controls, thermal, and balance-of-plant systems.
• Develop and maintain reliability block diagrams, fault trees, failure mode analyses, and other quantitative models used to understand how component and subsystem failures affect overall reactor performance and availability.
• Calculate and track key reliability metrics including failure rates, MTBF, MTTR, availability, probability of mission success, component life, and expected contribution to reactor downtime.
• Identify the components and failure modes that have the greatest impact on reactor capacity factor and lead focused improvement efforts to reduce those risks.
• Work directly with mechanical, electrical, controls, manufacturing, test, and reactor systems engineers to develop reliability improvement plans for the lowest-performing or highest-risk portions of the design.
• Evaluate design alternatives and architecture trades based on their impact to reliability, redundancy, maintainability, serviceability, and reactor capacity factor.
• Perform sensitivity and uncertainty analyses to determine which assumptions, failure rates, repair times, and component behaviors most strongly influence predicted reactor availability.
• Develop reliability predictions using component test data, supplier data, industry databases, accelerated life testing, engineering analysis, and field experience.
• Establish statistically sound methods for converting development and qualification test results into reliability estimates and confidence bounds.
• Define reliability demonstration

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• 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”
• Go Where the Work Is - Never miss a chance to meet a customer, user, or stakeholder face to face, even if that means hopping on a plane. If you can’t make it, find a teammate who can channel your intentions and go in your place. Deep work can be done from anywhere, but we believe teams are built in person, and aim to maximize our time together
• Operate in the Grey - Embrace nuance in pursuit of truth. Question every fundamental assumption

Equal Opportunity

Antares is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment decisions are based solely on merit, competence, and qualifications, without regard to 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.

ITAR REQUIREMENTS

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/?id=ddtc_kb_article_page&sys_id=24d528fddbfc930044f9ff621f961987.