Senior/Staff Space Systems Electrical Engineer

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

As a Staff Space Electrical Systems Engineer at Antares, you will own the system-level electrical architecture, requirements, interfaces, and verification strategy for first-of-a-kind space nuclear power systems and their associated development hardware.

Your scope will span power generation and conversion, power management and distribution, avionics, instrumentation and controls, communications, sensors, actuators, and electrical interfaces across the vehicle. You will define how these systems operate together during startup, nominal operation, degraded and faulted conditions, shutdown, and ground testing.

You will work closely with subsystem, integration, test, firmware, mechanical, thermal, reactor, and mission engineers to carry the architecture from early trades through hardware integration and verification. You will also support nuclear safety and licensing activities where those requirements affect the spacecraft electrical design.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the system-level electrical architecture for space nuclear power systems and associated development and test hardware.

• Translate mission and vehicle requirements into electrical system, subsystem, and interface requirements.

• Define power buses, voltage levels, power quality, load allocations, grounding and bonding, isolation, protection, redundancy, and electrical fault-containment boundaries.

• Develop electrical operating modes and transitions, including startup, power generation, load changes, degraded operation, fault response, shutdown, and ground-test configurations.

• Lead electrical architecture trades involving power distribution, bus segregation, redundancy, energy storage, avionics partitioning, fault tolerance, and system mass and efficiency.

• Allocate requirements and define interfaces across power conversion and distribution, avionics, instrumentation, controls, sensors, actuators, communications, and ground-support equipment.

• Develop and maintain electrical architecture diagrams, interface-control documents, power budgets, requirements, verification plans, and design-review material.

• Review subsystem and supplier designs for compliance with electrical requirements and compatibility with the overall system.

• Define the electrical verification and qualification strategy from component testing through integrated-system and environmental testing.

• Support hardware integration, system bring-up, troubleshooting, and anomaly resolution when system-level electrical judgment is required.

• Perform or support FMEA, single-point-failure, reliability, hazard, and fault-tolerance analyses.

• Provide electrical and I&C inputs to nuclear safety, DSA, and licensing activities in coordination with the Licensing team.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Controls Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

• Approximately 5+ years of relevant experience, or equivalent demonstrated ownership of complex electrical systems.

• Demonstrated ownership of electrical architecture, requirements, interfaces, or verification at the subsystem or vehicle level.

• Strong fundamentals in power distribution, grounding and bonding, isolation, fault protection, instrumentation, signal interfaces, control systems, and electrical fault management.

• Experience translating system requirements into electrical subsystem requirements, interface definitions, and verification methods.

• Experience developing and reviewing architecture diagrams, schematics, wiring documentation, ICDs, electrical budgets, test plans, and verification evidence.

• Hands-on experience integrating and troubleshooting complex electrical hardware.

• Ability to lead cross-functional technical decisions involving electrical, firmware, software, controls, mechanical, thermal, test, and systems teams.

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Master’s degree or higher in Electrical/Controls Engineering.

• Spacecraft, launch-vehicle, or other flight electrical-system architecture.

• Spacecraft PMAD, high-power or high-voltage distribution, batteries, motor drives, or power electronics.

• Avionics, embedded controls, instrumentation, sensors, actuators, and real-time control systems.

• Radiation, thermal-vacuum, EMI/EMC, vibration, shock, qualification, and acceptance testing.

• Grounding, bonding, shielding, isolation, fault protection, and redundancy architecture.

• FMEA, fault-tree, reliability, and single-point-failure analysis.

• Supplier technical management and hardware qualification.

• Nuclear, defense, or another regulated and configuration-controlled environment.

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.