Senior Power Electronics Engineer

Job description

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 This role owns the high-power electrical architecture of the plant. At the center is the common DC bus that connects the battery energy storage system, reactor power conversion system, and grid-tied inverter through a network of DC/DC converters. As the technical owner of this system, you will define its architecture, establish its performance and fault-handling requirements, lead supplier selection and validation, and drive the roadmap for future power and deployment scaling. Roles and Responsibilities: - Own the common DC bus: Define the architecture that interconnects energy storage, the reactor power conversion system, and the grid-tied inverter through DC/DC conversion — voltage levels, topology, sectionalizing, protection and coordination, grounding and isolation scheme, and the sizing margins behind all of it. - Own the expansion architecture: Define how the DC bus scales from a single unit to a multi-reactor plant: paralleling strategy, fault isolation between units, protection selectivity as available fault current grows, control hierarchy, and what has to be designed in now versus deferred. - Ensure the high voltage system integrates as a system: Verify that components from different vendors behave correctly together across the full range of reactor use cases, and that the whole is stable where the parts are individually fine. - Own HV system functions and their implementation: Battery management, bus precharge, isolation and insulation monitoring, power quality, grid-forming and grid-following operation, controlled and emergency shutdown, load shed, black-start, and failover communications — from definition through implementation and verification. - Own fault behavior across every case that matters: Load drop and rejection, short circuit faults, isolation and ground faults, and converter faults: know what the system does, prove it does that, and make sure protection coordination and control response hold up under each one. - Own the high power distribution test system at Antares HQ: Define and build the rig that lets us test at power. Work with facilities on the power infrastructure to feed it, with the test team on the test cases and campaign, and with the controls infrastructure team on data logging, instrumentation, and automation of repetitive test sequences. - Turn test results into design decisions: Run the campaigns that matter, close the loop on model correlation, and feed what you learn back into architecture and supplier requirements. - Own the power electronics supplier relationships: Energy storage systems, DC/DC converters, grid-tied inverters, and AC/DC converters — you're the technical owner of each: specification, evaluation, design review, integration support, issue escalation, and the long-term relationship. - Drive the electrical development roadmap: Evaluate suppliers and emerging technologies as we push toward higher power output, and make the build-versus-buy and technology-selection calls that shape the next generation of the system. - Shape the equipment pad layout: Work with harnessing and mechanical design engineers on physical arrangement, optimizing cable and busbar routing for voltage drop, loop inductance, EMI, thermal management, serviceability, and arc flash safety. Basic Qualifications - Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering or a related field - 5+ years in power electronics or high power electrical systems, including ownership of a system architecture through hardware bring-up - Direct experience with DC bus architectures interconnecting multiple sources and loads, protection, coordination, grounding and isolation, and fault current analysis - Hands-on experience with grid-tied inverters, DC/DC conversion, and battery energy storage integration - Experience with motor drive or generator inverter systems, including motor generator units (MGUs), traction drives, industrial motor drives, or comparable high power inverter applications - Experience with EMI/EMC testing at the product level - Demonstrated experience specifying, evaluating, and managing power electronics suppliers rather than only designing in-house - Demonstrated experience planning, leading, and executing high-power electrical test campaigns, including safe operation and troubleshooting of energized high-voltage systems. - Working knowledge of the codes and standards governing this equipment — for example NEC Articles 706 and 705, NFPA 70E, NFPA 855, UL 1741, UL 1973, UL 9540, IEEE 519, IEEE 1547, or IEC 62477 Preferred Skills & Experience - Experience developing or deploying grid-forming control strategies (e.g., droop control, virtual synchronous machines, or equivalent), including black-start demonstration on hardware. - Familiarity with IEEE 2800 and evolving interconnection requirements for inverter-based resources - Experience scaling a power architecture across multiple paralleled units or a multi-unit site - System modeling and study experience: PLECS, PSCAD, Simulink/Simscape, ETAP, SKM, or EasyPower for short circuit, arc flash, coordination, and stability studies - Experience with EMI/EMC design for high-dv/dt power electronics, including layout, bonding and grounding, filtering, cable shielding, and noise mitigation. - Experience delivering equipment under a formal quality program (NQA-1, 10 CFR 50 Appendix B, AS9100, IEC 61508) or into a safety-related application - Experience building test infrastructure from scratch, including working with facilities on service upgrades and with controls teams on automated data acquisition - Experience in another high power domain such as utility scale energy storage, marine, traction, or aerospace electrification, with expertise applicable to stationary power systems 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” - 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.