Senior/Staff Nuclear Safety Analysis 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

Antares Industries is seeking a Senior or Staff Nuclear Safety Analysis Engineer to take ownership of the safety analysis product delivered in support of the final design of the Mark 1 reactor. This individual will lead intact-event (non-breach) safety analysis, drive source term calculations rooted in TRISO fuel behavior and qualification, and translate reactor physics and neutronics uncertainty into radiological dose results. The role requires the judgment to scope phenomenological work appropriately—rigorous enough to defensibly bound figures of merit, without being exhaustive—and the independence to coordinate across every design discipline, the licensing team, and the testing and materials organizations. This is a technical ownership role: the successful candidate will be accountable for the quality, defensibility, and timeliness of safety analysis deliverables that directly support licensing of Mark 1 and inform the technical basis for follow-on designs.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Take end-to-end technical ownership of the safety analysis deliverables supporting final design of the Mark 1 reactor scope, technical approach, schedule, and quality.
• Perform and oversee deterministic safety analysis of intact (non-breach) events. Apply Phenomena Identification and Ranking Table (PIRT) methods and other systematic scoping approaches to focus analysis on dominant phenomena, ensuring figures of merit are adequately and defensibly bounded without exhaustive, low-value modeling.
• Develop source term calculations that account for TRISO fuel behavior and qualification, including mechanistic failure of fuel layers (e.g., buffer/IPyC/SiC/OPyC) under irradiation and elevated temperature, fission product release and transport, radionuclide grouping, and identification of dominant dose drivers.
• Understand and quantify how neutronics model uncertainties (power distribution, burnup/depletion, isotopics, cross-section data) propagate through fuel performance and source term models into final dose calculations.
• Work independently across a

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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.