Senior/Staff Electrical Systems 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 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, test cases, instrumentation, and pass/fail criteria — and support execution on the bench and in the testbed when it counts. - Support the licensing case: Translate system design into the documentation a regulator reads: work with the licensing and systems engineering teams to produce and defend the I&C content in our safety analysis and design documents, and keep requirements traceability intact from regulation down to test result. - Own site certification for non-listed components: Where the electrical system uses components without an existing UL listing, own the path to acceptance — field evaluation with an NRTL, the supporting technical documentation, and the relationship with the authority having jurisdiction. - Support grid interconnection: Partner with the mission and deployment teams as the electrical technical lead when we interconnect at a site: interpret utility interconnection requirements, support interconnection studies and applications, and translate what the utility demands — protection and relaying, power quality, ride-through and trip settings, metering, disconnection and islanding behavior — into requirements our design actually has to meet. - Own the electrical requirements conversation with customers: Work directly with customers to capture their load requirements — profiles, critical and non-critical loads, power quality expectations, redundancy and availability — along with their user interface and data requirements, and bring those back as specified, verifiable requirements rather than expectations captured in an email thread. - Bridge controls software and physical hardware: Work with the software and controls team to close the gap between operator interfaces and alarms, control law behavior, and the response times and physical characteristics of real sensors, actuators, and I/O. Identify the edge cases — sensor failure, signal loss, out-of-range, degraded modes, timing margins — and make sure each one is accounted for in both the control law and the test plan. - Influence design through review: Bring requirements and integration insight into cross-functional design reviews, and hold the line on decisions that would compromise verifiability or the licensing case. Basic Qualifications - Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related field - 7+ years in electrical or I&C systems engineering, including ownership of a requirement baseline through verification - Demonstrated experience writing decomposed, verifiable requirements with measurable acceptance criteria - Demonstrated experience leading FMEA or equivalent structured reliability analysis, and converting the output into a real test and mitigation plan - Experience authoring validation and qualification plans and working directly with a test organization to execute them - Experience defining and maintaining hardware and software interface control documents across organizational boundaries - Experience delivering hardware under a formal quality program, NQA-1, 10 CFR 50 Appendix B, AS9100, IEC 61508, or comparable Preferred Skills & Experience - Experience in Nuclear or a similarly regulated environment (aerospace, defense, medical device, etc.) - Direct experience with nuclear I&C standards and guidance, IEEE 603, IEEE 7-4.3.2, IEEE 323, IEEE 344, IEEE 384, IEEE 379, and the Chapter 7 expectations in NUREG-0800 - Experience supporting a licensing submittal to the NRC or a DOE authorization basis, including responding to regulator questions - Familiarity with diversity and defense-in-depth analysis, common cause failure analysis, and single failure criterion arguments - Experience with NRTL field evaluation or field labeling of non-listed equipment (NFPA 791, NEC 110.3) and working with an AHJ - Functional safety background, IEC 61508, 61511, or 61513, and comfortable reasoning about SIL or equivalent integrity arguments - Experience with requirements management and MBSE tooling (DOORS, Jama, Polarion, Cameo/SysML) - Human factors or alarm management exposure, NUREG-0711, ISA 18.2 and experience specifying operator interface behavior Salary Range: Senior Electrical Systems Engineer: $150,000-$185,000 Staff Electrical Systems Engineer: $180,000-$220,000 Your actual level and base salary will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the following considerations: job-related knowledge and skills, education, and experience. 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.