Senior/Staff Electrical Systems Engineer

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.

About the Role

Our reactor's Instrumentation and Controls system is fundamentally an electrical system: sensors and transmitters, signal conditioning and I/O, instrument power and distribution, actuators and their drive electronics, control panels, and every cable and interface between them. This role owns the electrical requirements for that system and the evidence that it work, what each element must do, how it can fail, how we prove its performance, and how we defend those claims to a regulator.

You'll work at the layer where control intent becomes hardware behavior: signal accuracy, response time, failure states, electrical interfaces, redundancy, power quality, and system integration. Your work establishes the technical baseline that controls software, testing, licensing, and plant operations rely on. This role carries technical authority over the I&C requirements baseline, ensuring every requirement is clear, traceable, and verifiable.

Roles & Responsibilities

• Work with electrical system Responsible Engineers to create the requirement baseline: Capture regulatory, functional, performance, safety, and concept-of-operations requirements, decompose them to the component level, and make sure every one of them carries measurable, verifiable acceptance criteria. No requirement leaves your hands without a way to prove it was met.
• Own and maintain interface control documents: Define and hold the hardware and software ICDs across every electrical system — signal definitions, ranges, timing, protocols, power and grounding, failure and default states — so that subsystem teams can build independently and still integrate.
• Own the I&C Design FMEA: Drive failure mode identification to completion, score severity, occurrence, and detection, and calculate risk priority numbers. Then make the analysis matter: build and drive the test plan that burns down the high-RPN modes, and track them to closure.
• Create the design validation and qualification plan: Define what qualification means for each I&C system, then partner with the test team to specify test setups

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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.